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'HawthoRNe,' the
RN's for rather not

TNT nurse drama works over the familiar themes

By Tom Conroy
Jun 16, 2009

With "HawthoRNe," Jada Pinkett Smith becomes the third big-name actress starring in a TNT drama, after Kyra Sedgwick in "The Closer" and Holly Hunter in "Saving Grace." Unfortunately, Pinkett Smith lacks the star power to make her vehicle a must-see.

Playing Christina Hawthorne, a widowed single mother who’s the chief nursing officer at a hospital in Richmond, Va., Pinkett Smith conveys her character’s strengths, anxieties and charm. But unlike the actresses mentioned above, she fails to bring enough idiosyncrasies to add interest to the too-familiar problems in the scripts.

It doesn’t help that "HawthoRNe," which is premiering tonight at 9, comes so soon after Showtime’s "Nurse Jackie," in which an idiosyncratic big-name actress (Edie Falco) also plays a no-nonsense nurse who’s more capable than most of the doctors in her hospital.

In Pinkett Smith’s defense, her scripts don’t give her a lot to work with. In each of the three episodes TNT provided for review, Christina violates hospital protocol in order to help her patients and her fellow nurses. When a colleague says she can’t jeopardize her own job, Christina replies, "Yes, you can. I do it practically every day. And I have to tell you, it gets really easy once you get in the habit."

Christina has deep, meaningful conversations with the handsome head of surgery, Dr. Tom Wakefield (Michael Vartan of "Alias"), the oncologist who treated her husband. It’s unclear whether we should expect this relationship to turn into something more serious.

Christina’s predictably rebellious teenage daughter, Camille (Hannah Hodson), is another burden. In the premiere, after getting in trouble, Camille tells her high school principal, "One year ago today, my mom let my dad die."

Christina occasionally bickers with her former mother-in-law (Joanna Cassidy of "Six Feet Under"), who, viewers will groan to learn, is also a member of the hospital board. This shoe remains undropped in the first three episodes.

Although Pinkett Smith is an executive producer of the show, "HawthoRNe" isn’t a vanity production. Some plotlines center on the other nurses, including Christina’s friend and confidante Bobbie (Suleka Mathew), who has a prosthetic leg; Ray (David Julian Hirsh), who has a crush on the gorgeous nurse Candy (Christina Moore); and Kelly (Vanessa Lengies), a newbie who is intimidated by both doctors and patients.

Even after three episodes, the main characters’ problems remain uninvolving, largely because the scripts rarely come up with new takes on old themes: the overly competent underling, workplace sexual tension, caring too much about a patient, a rookie’s triumphs, the resilience of the mother-child bond.

Another problem is the shaky directing. One scene with a man threatening to jump off a building almost seems to be played for laughs, while the deliberately comedic moments involving Ray’s romantic frustration fall flat.

Still, this is summertime, when viewers’ expectations are low. They could do worse than spend an hour in the care of "HawthoRNe."

By the way, those unusual capital letters in the show’s title apparently stand for "registered nurse" and not "rather nondescript."

Tom Conroy is a Connecticut writer and longtime TV critic.	© 2009 Media Life Magazine

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