Subscribe To This Site

Daren in Brief - EDIE FALCO RULES!
by Daren Foster

Search more REVIEWS/COLUMNS

DAREN FOSTER PODCAST - NEW and OLD Cable shows

WATCH FILMS
2008 Shorts
2007 Shorts
Drama Shorts
Comedy Shorts
Horror Shorts
Animation Shorts
Action Shorts
Thriller Shorts
DOC Shorts
Experimental
Musical Videos
1 Minute Movies

Daren in Brief
Edie Falco Rules!

by Daren Foster

You can take your Kate Winslets and your Cate Blanchetts and throw in a Tilda Swinton (and, good god, a Meryl Streep, please), after watching the premiere of Nurse Jackie I can say most emphatically that Edie Falco is the best actress working in film and television today. Fuck that. She may be the best actor working today. That’s how blown away I was by her performance in Nurse Jackie.

This shouldn’t come as any surprise. Falco was note perfect season after season in The Sopranos. As mafia wife, Carmela Soprano, she was equal measure psychologically abused victim, overbearing mother, master manipulator who bore her guilt ridden conscience with a rationalized strength her husband could only dream of possessing. In a show packed to the rafters with outstanding acting, Falco consistently and justifiably hogged the spotlight. I say that in the most positive, glowing sense of the term possible.

In an opinion based only on seeing the first episode of Nurse Jackie, Falco is working with far less layered, nuanced material than was at her disposal on The Sopranos. Airing on Showtime, home to such series as Dexter, Weeds, Californication, United States of Tara, it’s a network that pushes edgy television above all else. Things that tend to hold audiences such as character development or organic, believable story arcs do not figure prominently at Showtime. Nurse Jackie looks to be very much of that ilk, full as it is of quirky characters that only exist on quirky obsessed shows and situations that arise purely because they can (only on Showtime!) not because they should. Did you ever see a patient wheeled into the hospital in E.R. because he shot fireworks out his ass? Only on Showtime!

But Falco rises above all that, carrying the show on her stunningly good reactive shoulders. Regardless of where the series goes, at least for the first season, I will follow devotedly solely because of Edie Falco. She is that good.