It lasts a half-hour, and it's meant to be funny, but it's not the standard setup/punchline/laugh-track fare. Like "Malcolm in the Middle" and its NBC sibling "Scrubs," "Leap of Faith" is filmed with a single camera -- not the four used on most TV comedies -- and its humor relies more on subtle observations than one-liners and physical shtick.

The second thing Edelstein wants to express is her excitement about the show, which premieres in the tricky post-"Friends" slot at 8:30 p.m. ET Thursday, Feb. 28.

"I have great feelings about it," Edelstein tells Zap2it.com. "The cast is amazing. They couldn't have done better as far as getting the right pieces together."

Those pieces include Sarah Paulson ("Jack and Jill") as Faith, a 30ish advertising writer we meet just as she's realizing her fianc?sn't The One, throwing off her entire "life plan." Edelstein plays Patty, Faith's committedly single best friend. The show was created by "Sex and the City" writer Jenny Bicks, and the cast also includes Ken Marino ("Dawson's Creek"), Regina King ("Jerry Maguire" ), Jill Clayburgh and Brad Rowe ("Wasteland").

"It's really smartly written," Edelstein adds. "We're having a great time."

Those who watch "Sex and the City" will recognize some similarities in "Leap of Faith": the small group of friends that gathers regularly to talk about life and love, the New York setting, the lead character's fear of commitment. But there are differences, both on the surface -- one of the main characters is a guy, and network constraints don't allow graphic sex talk -- and deeper in "Faith's" fabric.

"'Sex and the City,' I believe, [is] an ensemble show about four women looking for love," Bicks said at NBC's January press tour. "This is about one woman's journey away from feeling as though she has to find a man. She's going out into the world. It's much more Mary Tyler Moore, in my mind, for the 2000s than it is 'Sex and the City.'"

Edelstein, who describes her character as "much more wild and free-spirited" than Faith, could be seen as a dark-haired version of Kim Cattrall's Samantha on "Sex and the City." Edelstein believes Patty isn't as callous as Samantha, however.

"Patty's seen a lot, but she's not hard. She still has a lot of fun and innocence in her," Edelstein says. "She hasn't been crushed by living her life on the edge."

Edelstein knows a little something of the New York wild life. As a student at New York University in the mid-'80s, she became a regular in the city's club scene and gossip columns. "My experiences at that age were completely absurd," she says. "[Patty's] are much more those of a normal human being's."

Being an It Girl wore on Edelstein, and she eventually stepped away from the club scene. She instead focused her energy on writing, casting, producing and starring in "Positive Me," a musical about AIDS that ran for two years at the La MaMa theater in New York's East Village.

This year, Edelstein has had to juggle shooting "Leap of Faith" with doing a guest stint on The WB's "Felicity," as a woman who further complicates the relationship between Felicity (Keri Russell) and Ben (Scott Speedman). She also had to shoot "Leap of Faith's" pilot twice, after Paulson -- who appeared with Edelstein in the Mel Gibson movie "What Women Want" -- replaced Gretchen Egolf in the lead role.

Shooting new episodes came as a relief to Edelstein, who knew the pilot script "backward and forward" after shooting it twice. "The challenge is not to imitate things you enjoyed about your last performance," she says. "You have to start fresh."

Although the post-"Friends" timeslot has been something of a graveyard in recent years for NBC -- see "Inside Schwartz," "The Weber Show," "Jesse" -- Edelstein doesn't fret over it.