With great power comes great responsibility.

That old saw comes from good old Uncle Ben of Spider Man fame, and it’s actually pretty accurate, especially as it relates to the Showtime series Nurse Jackie.  The folks out at Lions Gate packed up a copy of Nurse Jackie’s first season and sent it out to me to have a look at, and I have to admit, I’m pretty surprised by what I see.

It’s a strange world nurse Jackie Payton lives in, and when you consider that the first few minutes of the series starts out with “What do you call a nurse with chronic back pain?  Unemployed!”, you know that this will NOT be like ER.

Nor will it be like Scrubs.

But if you put the two together, and add an epic amount of profanity, you get a pretty good idea of what Nurse Jackie is going to be like.

Nurse Jackie’s got chronic back pain, a moderate painkiller addiction, and a sense of humor that can only be described as twisted.  And over the course of her career–which we’ll see a good chunk of–we’re going to run into a whole lot of weird, hilarious and horrendous things.

I’ve seen a few medical shows in my time, and I’ve never seen one that’s such a wild whipsaw of emotion as Nurse Jackie.  It’s a little incoherent at times–frankly, it has a tendency to whipsaw just a bit TOO much sometimes, I went from sad to pissed to exhilarated and laughing within just a few minutes.  And the end of the first episode will likely be the most unexpected few minutes you’ve seen in a television series in some time.

And while the acting in here is pretty solid all around, the absolute grand gold bull moose award winner for this whole thing clearly must be Edie Falco as the titular Nurse Jackie, who will be responsible, directly, for a whole lot of the drama, heartbreak, and laughs.

The Screenhead Ten Scale is terribly enthusiastic about all this and thus hands Nurse Jackie’s first season a seven out of ten for being a series with a whole lot of emotional power but not so much control.