Showtime Orders New Edie Falco Series

LOS ANGELES, July 21: Emmy
Award-winner Edie Falco will star as a New York City hospital nurse in a new
Lionsgate series for Showtime, set to premiere next year.

Tentatively titled Nurse
Jackie, the 12-episode, half-hour,
single-camera dark comedy series is slated to go into production in New York
this year. Falco, best known for her work on The Sopranos, stars as a strong-willed, iconoclastic New York
City nurse juggling the frenzied pace at an urban hospital and a challenging
personal life.

Announcing the new series,
Robert Greenblatt, the president of entertainment for Showtime, noted: "Nothing is
more thrilling for us than bringing Edie Falco to Showtime in this unique,
quirky, touching comedy/drama. If you suddenly found yourself in the hospital
and fighting through our health care system, you would want no one other than Edie
Falco—or Nurse Jackie—by your side. This show will illuminate the
complex and often heroic people who devote their lives to healing the sick
while simultaneously trying to make sense of their own complicated personal
lives. It's quintessential premium cable, and with Edie on board,
quintessential Showtime."

Kevin Beggs, the president of programming and production for Lionsgate, added:
"We're thrilled about the pickup of Nurse Jackie and the expansion of our relationship with
Showtime on what we expect will be another groundbreaking series. This
subversive, yet wildly entertaining examination of our broken health care
system, brought to life by the incomparable Edie Falco and an amazing creative
team, promises to excite and provoke audiences."

The premium network also
announced the pickup of Lock ‘n Load, a half-hour, six-episode reality series set in The Shootist gun
store in Englewood, Colorado, for launch in 2009. Showtime also renewed Penn
& Teller: Bullshit!, with ten
new episodes for next year.

—By Mansha Daswani