Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

How much longer can Edie Falco's "Nurse Jackie" remain on the road to ruin without arriving? For three entertaining seasons now, viewers have seen Jackie's pill addiction leading her into more and more lies and worse and worse problems, personally and professionally. So, with Season 4 of the Showtime series ready to be unveiled April 8, one wonders how much longer can she keep going.

"Everybody's tolerance for the insanity of addiction is different," points out the Emmy-winning Falco. "We'll see her still fumbling around to find out exactly what her bottom is, what her last straw is."

But if she rehabs or overdoses, the show is over, right?

Not at all, assures Falco, 20 years sober this year and a long-time proponent of 12-step programs. "I'm living proof of life after addiction," she says. "Actually, for a lot of people, the real insanity of life is when they quit drugs. What they get to is what was underneath it all the time, and they have to deal with that without anesthetizing themselves."

In the wake of Whitney Houston's death, Falco is all the more mindful of how much she values her sobriety. "As I've spoken to a lot of other recovering people, I feel tremendous gratitude," she tells us. "Why can some of us make it out of the quicksand, and others can't? I don't know. Like many people, I have some friends who still can't quite pull themselves out."

She's talked before about the necessity of "getting out of your own way" to survive and thrive. What does that mean? How does a person get out of his or her own way?

"It involves a great deal of relaxation, a great deal of trust and faith," she replies. "It's not much more than a decision, really. You don't have to have proof that it works; you have to decide 'This will work.' What needs to get done will get done. You will be given the impulses you will need to get through your life. And the muscles to do that get stronger and stronger the more you do it."

For those who wish to catch up, Season 3 of "Nurse Jackie" is newly out on DVD this week.

FIELDING THE PLAY: John Tesh's decade-old "Intelligence for Your Life" show has radio stations all across the country and English-speaking world — 380, according to him.

But it doesn't have Los Angeles station KFSH as of earlier this month, and Tesh's fans hereabouts have been making their unhappiness known all over the Internet. He's more than touched — he's been inspired to take action.

"It's pretty funny, isn't it? In the old days, if someone canceled a show, it was, 'Well, time to move on.'" But the composer-cum-TV-host-cum-radio-personality is not just moving on. He's producing his own LA-oriented version of his show and putting it out online — "K-TESH," on his Tesh.com site, starting April 2.

"It's a lot of work. We have to snap up a local news guy, a traffic guy ... Some people listen in the car, so there'll be a portable app," says Tesh. He adds that he wouldn't be going to these lengths had he not seen Facebook and Twitter postings day after day from fans urging KFSH to reconsider — "if people had just been sort of like 'Bummer.'" He also says he has long-time LA advertisers already aboard for the switch.

Tesh is aiming to make the show LA-specific, putting it on during his old time slot, intending not to "get in the way of our stations in New York and Toledo, and other cities where they stream it themselves." Of course, on the Internet, people can tune in from anywhere in the world if they feel so inclined. "The playing field has changed so much. You have to go where the people are," he says.

CALIENTE: Talk about an English and Spanish mashup. Will Ferrell's publicity onslaught for his March 16-release Spanish language film, "Casa De Mi Padre" includes an interview with the ever-hotter Latin pop culture magazine Latin Trends. Ferrell doesn't speak Spanish, but that didn't stop him from putting together his telenovela sendup, which also stars Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal and Genesis Rodriguez. And it didn't matter for Latin Trends, which is in English.

Latin Trends currently has New York Giants' Victor Cruz on the cover, a lucky get indeed, considering the Giants had yet to win the Super Bowl when it was done.

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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