She’s giving it a shot

NEW YORK —  The premise of “Nurse Jackie,” an original series on Showtime that premieres Monday, sounds inherently dark: Edie Falco plays a pill-popping emergency room nurse wearily combating the dysfunction of a chaotic big-city hospital.

But there was little somberness in evidence on a cold winter day in February as Falco shot a short scene with costars Peter Facinelli and Merritt Wever on a soundstage in Queens. As the actors recited the brief dialogue, the producers and crew tried in vain to stifle their laughter.

The chuckling began as Facinelli, as the love-struck young Dr. Fitch Cooper, approached the nurses’ station and silently presented Falco’s Jackie Peyton with an offering of pink roses and a pack of gum.

“No,” Jackie said exasperatedly. “Don’t.”

Then Wever, who portrays the wide-eyed novice nurse Zoey Barkow, did a double-take as a patient was wheeled past the nurses’ station.

“Oooh, it’s the movie critic from ‘Good Morning New York,’ ” she squealed, bouncing up and down so vigorously that her long brown hair came loose from its braid. Guffaws filled the room.

“I can’t wait to see that on TV,” executive producer John Melfi said with a grin, peering at the scene on a monitor.

As the latest television series to embrace the dramedy genre, “Nurse Jackie” balances the crises that Jackie confronts with bursts of drollness. The character shares some of the dark humor and steeliness of Carmela, the mob wife Falco played on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” a part that garnered her three Emmys and made her a sought-after lead once the drama finished its long-lauded run in 2007. But the comedy required in the role represented a new foray.

The actress said she was open to doing another television series, but at first had trouble finding the right project. “For a while I thought, well, maybe I just don’t want to work anymore, or work now, because nothing was appealing to me,” she said during a break between scenes, perched in a director’s chair in blue scrubs, her blond hair cropped short. “It actually was a little nerve-racking. But I read this and I thought, ‘Here’s something.’ ”

Signing Falco, who was long associated with HBO, was the latest coup by Showtime. In the last several years, the premium cable channel has made a splash with original series such as “Weeds,” “Dexter” and “The Tudors,” raising the network’s profile and boosting subscriber numbers. In Jackie, the network is adding another flawed character to the mix that executives hope will be compelling. And indeed, early reviews laud Falco’s performance (“strong, complex, funny,” according to the New Yorker) and the series’ unorthodox iteration of a medical drama.

The actress was fascinated by Jackie’s “very opinionated, very tough” demeanor, but was initially apprehensive about the series’ comedic elements.

“I kind of felt like that was for other actors, that that was never my thing, maybe because I wasn’t ever cast that way,” Falco said. “The idea that this was going to be overtly funny -- I wasn’t sure that was where I wanted to go. I just don’t have the instincts in that regard.”

But Falco quickly adjusted to the series’ quirky, deadpan tone. “She’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” said executive producer Linda Wallem, who serves as the program’s show runner along with executive producer Liz Brixius. “She just doesn’t believe it. And what is amazing is to have somebody that funny who also has such gravity. It’s the most powerful, wonderful thing to watch.”

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Revenge in play

Blunt and acidic, Jackie harbors secrets from those around her, including her addiction to pain medication. But as she wrestles with her weaknesses, she also ekes out her own brand of vigilante justice at the hospital.

“She’s got her own moral code,” Brixius said. “There’s definitely right and wrong with her, but it’s not the same as yours and mine. And it’s a little bit like Dirty Harry: ‘At the end of the day, I’m just going to make sure that justice is done.’ ”

One episode involves a pedophile and catheter “and that’s all I’m going to say,” Wallem added mischievously. “There are going to be outrageous things on this show, but people are going to cheer. The whole world is going to root for her.”

“Nurse Jackie” has its origins in an encounter that executive producer Caryn Mandabach had with an emergency room nurse. Struck by her stories, Mandabach asked her to keep a journal, which then turned into a script for Showtime by Evan Dunsky.

Falco and her manager, Richie Jackson, read the pilot but initially passed on it. A year later, Showtime Entertainment President Bob Greenblatt was courting Falco to come to the network, and Jackson remembered the actress had been intrigued by the nurse character. Greenblatt tapped Wallem and Brixius to take on the project.

They reworked the script in 10 days, fashioning Jackie as a flawed Robin Hood figure. Both were determined to keep the series centered on a nurse’s perspective, soliciting anecdotes from real nurses to keep the show grounded.

“Nurses are the ones with the best stories,” Brixius said. “The doctors aren’t plugged into the people; they’re plugged into the conditions, the ailments. Nurses are the ones that are holding your hand, changing your dressing, checking your blood pressure. As writers, we can relate to nurses, because we’re always the ones who are behind the scenes.”

“And being women in television, we’re in a world that’s run by men, so we really relate,” Wallem added.

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Real-world drama

While the narrative centers on Jackie’s life at the hospital, the series seeks to stand out from other medical dramas.

“It’s the anti-’ER’/’Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” Wallem said.

“There’s no code black, where somebody swallowed a bomb,” Brixius added.

It’s trickier for a concept like “Jackie” coming in the wake of shows like “ER,” Wallem said, “because there’s so much drums and dramas and craziness -- and the truth is, that’s not how it is.”

Instead, the drama of the show is built into the ethical choices that Jackie is forced to make about her patients and her family. Complicating everything is her addiction to pain medication.

“There are massive consequences to addiction, that in order to keep using, you have to keep rationalizing and tell yourself a different story and underplay the damage that you’re doing, and that is the interesting part of Jackie,” Brixius said. “And it’s also where a lot of our comedy comes from. It’s not that it’s funny, it’s that it’s absurd.”

Wallem, Brixius and Falco can all relate to Jackie’s addiction. All three are recovering alcoholics, a fact that helped them instantly bond when they first got together over dinner to discuss the script. “At our first meeting, we sat down and one of them said something like, ‘Well, now that I’m sober 15 years’ and I said, ‘I’m sober 15 years!’ ” Falco recalled.

Falco said she struggled with alcohol in college and the years immediately after as she tried to make it as an actor in New York. Eventually she stopped drinking after “just ugly, ugly, horrible messes.” So Jackie’s mistakes make “perfect sense to me,” she said. “It’s just intrinsic in your cells if you’re an addict that you screw things up.”

But she’s not sure whether viewers will be put off by Jackie’s flaws or find her endearing.

“I’ll be very curious to know if people find her sympathetic,” Falco said. “It will be a long time before I know if I do. I’m still trying to figure out who she is, who she would be if I would meet her, where I would put her in my brain.”

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matea.gold@latimes.com