Good news for everyone who doesn’t subscribe to Showtime—unless you’re a diehard Edie Falco fan, there’s no reason to shell out for Nurse Jackie when NBC is offering Mercy every Wednesday night.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Falco’s Jackie is fast shaping up to be one of the best anti-heroines on television at the moment, and Mercy is clearly the network-friendly version. But the similarities are striking: nurses as the hospital employees who have the patient’s best interests most at heart, a morally suspect lead character, winningly acerbic supporting characters, and a reluctance to engage in overtly soapy storylines.

Nurse Veronica (Taylor Schilling) has recently returned from Iraq with a chip on her shoulder. In the pilot’s opening moments, she dashes out of a coffee shop to save a man with a bottle jammed in his chest, grabbing his obnoxious fiancée by her pre-plastic surgery nose and ordering her to shut up and help. Turns out that since she’s not a doctor, her bossy, life-saving behavior brings her in for tongue lashings from her superiors and the idiot doctors with whom she’s forced to work (one forgets to say “Clear!” when using the defibrillator). Her fellow nurses, sassy African-American Sonia (Jamie Lee Kirchner), a two-in-one minority, the gay Latino Angel (Guillermo Diaz), and newbie Chloe (Michelle Trachtenberg), are right there with her, but none of them are as emotionally volatile as Veronica. Chloe even resorts to tears when she has to pull the plug on a 75-year-old man with cancer on her first day.

Of course, Veronica also has hard-drinking parents at home (Kate Mulgrew is a hoot as her mother), and an estranged husband who’s trying to win her back in his own bumbling way. And though Mercy veers dangerously close to Grey’s Anatomy by introducing the man Veronica had a fling with in Iraq (James Tupper), a doctor who conveniently signs a two-year contract with the hospital without even telling Veronica he’s tracked her down, the chemistry between Tupper and Schilling is electric enough to excuse it.

Schilling, like Falco, really is the reason Mercy succeeds as well as it does—though a cast of your favorite character actors, from Mulgrew to Margo Martindale, doesn’t hurt. Every TV season brings its new crop of rising young stars, but Schilling already seems like a seasoned pro. Her Veronica is tart and aggressive, but she never feels overbearing or arrogant. She’s just a battle-hardened woman who’s seen too much suffering in Iraq to allow more to continue under her watch, and to hell with anyone who has issues with her. It’s a winning combination of performer and role, and turns Mercy from another fantasy fulfiller in which a hospital’s staff actually care about their patients into this season’s must see medical drama.

Photo courtesy of NBC.