Edie Falco: back for a new shift on ‘Nurse Jackie’

NEW YORK (AP) - Edie Falco has performed the near impossible: She has made a clean break with the show that made her a star yet could have pegged her for a lifetime as mobster wife Carmela Soprano.

In the title role of “Nurse Jackie,” Falco has ably recast herself as a guardian angel with a cranky attitude, a bad back and a penchant for cheating on her husband with the guy who supplies her with pain pills.

Now, that was Carmela who?

At the end of last season, Jackie Peyton’s unsteady world seemed to be blowing up. Her loyal but running-out-of-patience husband (Dominic Fumusa) had discovered her latest deception.

“I keep telling you I’m no prize, and you won’t listen,” she confessed.

“Is that everything?” he asked her as she hugged him.

“I love you,” she said. “Yes, that’s everything.”

But it’s not everything.

Back for a third season (Monday at 10 p.m. EDT on Showtime), Jackie, with her emergency-room scrubs, pixie haircut and caustic manner, resumes her hectic life of juggling lies.

“Anyone who knows you knows they don’t know you,” as the hospital pharmacist (Paul Schulze) who is Jackie’s source for drugs and on-the-job quickies once told her.

Even Falco doesn’t claim to know Jackie.

“I don’t know that I ever really feel like I’m getting my arms around the character,” Falco says. “But I think that’s why I want to do it. What ends up getting on film is my attempts to get my arms around an idea of who this woman is.”

When it premiered two years ago, “Nurse Jackie” became an instant hit for Showtime. Viewers were hooked on this dark comedy about a woman who is fiercely dedicated to healing her patients while no less resolute, it seems, on damaging herself and others in her path. (Last season the role brought Falco an Emmy for best actress in a comedy series, adding to her stash of three Emmys for “The Sopranos.”)

Much of Jackie’s struggle stems from her addiction.

It’s a plight that’s familiar to Falco, who, even though she has been sober for two decades, has made good use of her experience with alcohol abuse in playing Jackie.

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