| 100 |
USA Today Robert Bianco
Once you get past the premiere, series are often a crapshoot. But Showtime made all 12 episodes available for preview, and through that run, the energy never flags and the performances get deeper and richer. |
| 90 |
PopMatters Michael Abernethy
Nurse Jackie offers both gripping drama and outrageous comedy. |
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune Maureen Ryan
The half-hour format is perfect for this deftly directed program, which is character-based storytelling concentrated to espresso strength. |
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
With Falco front and center, you don't really care if Nurse Jackie gets silly, as with the patient whose cat attacked his scrotum. |
| 80 |
Hollywood Reporter Randee Dawn
The fantastical creation of Jackie Peyton, perhaps surprisingly, has shades of gray that make her very real indeed. Both show and character are something wonderful to behold -- and worth taking multiple doses of. |
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times Mary McNamara
Funny, yes, but in a revelatory way. It is not unusual for a working mother to view every relationship in her life as simply a matter of fulfilling the next indicated task, but I don't think it has ever been so wonderfully, and painfully, captured on television before. |
| 80 |
Miami Herald Glenn Garvin
Grimly funny, streaked with sentimentality and malice, Nurse Jackie is the medical miracle of television's summer season, a blue-collar hospital show without a McDreamy in sight. |
| 80 |
New York Daily News David Hinckley
A splendid new addition to pay-cable's stock of dark comedies that keep a human heart beating behind the laughs. |
| 80 |
Philadelphia Daily News Ellen Gray
Falco's simply magnificent in a role that exploits a certain no-nonsense quality she's always brought to even the nonsensical aspects of her characters. |
| 80 |
Washington Post Tom Shales
The casting, like the writing and direction, is impeccable, and includes Eve Best as Jackie's doctor friend Eleanor; Peter Facinelli as cute but semi-competent ER physician Fitch "Coop" Cooper; Merritt Wever as a bleeding-heart novice; and Haaz Sleiman as a gay Muslim orderly. |
| 80 |
Slate Troy Patterson
Falco has the strength to sell the overwrought cliches and to force each important moment to its crisis. |
| 80 |
The New Yorker Nancy Franklin
The result, with its strong, complex, funny, flawed central character, feels truer to life than the zillions of one-dimensional (or no-dimensional) nurses on television. |
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle Tim Goodman
The workaday mysteries of Jackie and the phenomenal performance of Falco are more than enough to hold down the series while the rest of the characters find their niche. |
| 70 |
Wall Street Journal Nancy DeWolf Smith
The show’s writers and producers may be trying to force-feed her to us as the health-care equivalent of the whore with a heart of gold. But Ms. Falco manages to shake off clichés and attract us to her for reasons never referred to in the script. |
| 70 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
Tonight's pilot suffers from a few up-the-ante, "look-at-me!" moments, like when Coop grabs Jackie's breast and claims it's a nervous tic. Future episodes are more grounded and less desperate to shock for the sake of grabbing viewer (and network) attention, but they're no less enthralling with both drama and humor. |
| 70 |
The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
It has one of the most talented actresses on television as its lead, and yet over all Nurse Jackie is surprisingly, and disconcertingly, off key. This is a drama draped in black humor that doesn’t know when to be funny. |
| 70 |
New York Magazine Emily Nussbaum
At times, there's a dangerous undercurrent of anti-sentimentality, a risk of sentimentalizing curmudgeonliness itself. But for all these flaws, I still found the series excitingly ambitious--funny, sexy, strange. |
| 70 |
Boston Globe Joanna Weiss
If there's a glaring flaw, it's in the character of Dr. Eleanor O'Hara (Eve Best). As comic relief, she's far too thin. Nurse Jackie has much richer, darker comedy to offer. |
| 67 |
Newsday Verne Gay
The pilot is flawed (most pilots are), not particularly funny and even--bizarrely--deploys two bland jokes from the "Weeds" premiere at 10 (did the writers trade notes?). But Falco is good, proving that she can transcend Carmela Soprano. |
| 67 |
Time James Poniewozik
Some of the supporting characters need work (especially a too sitcommy administrator played by Anna Deavere Smith), and some patients-of-the-week veer into clichés. But Falco is outstanding as a living reminder that you meet angels only in the next life. |
| 63 |
Slant Magazine Adam Keleman
The series too often relies on oddly placed broad humor, which entirely deflates the weightier moments. |
| 60 |
Variety Brian Lowry
While the title character is consistently rough and the language blue, in subsequent episodes (Showtime sent six out for review) the series increasingly feels like all style and limited substance--a star showcase that's less "triumphant return" than "Nice to have you back, but ..." |
| 60 |
Salon Heather Havrilesky
For all of its charms, Nurse Jackie needs to offer a little more than an enigmatic nurse and a parade of clever grouches. |
