Hawthorne (2009 - 2011): Review By Brian Gallagher

For a time… well, up until just a few years ago, really, if you were a movie star, you didn’t go near the small screen except for maybe a special guest starring role just for kicks. With the landscape of cable changing the face of television, we now have stars of film like Glenn Close on Damages (who actually helped pave the way with her starring role in Season 4 of The Shield), and the current TNT lineup which includes Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, Holly Hunter on Saving Grace and Timothy Hutton on one of my new personal favorites, Leverage. TNT adds another star of the silver screen to its lineup with Jada Pinkett Smith starring in the new series Hawthorne, and with the kind of writing that comes with this show (and all those aforementioned shows), it’s no surprise why movie stars are heading over to the small screen, and Pinkett Smith’s new series is another wonderful addition to the already-strong TNT slate.

To be honest, I was a bit worried about this show because of two little words: “medical drama,” a term that after the success of ER and countless others, basically became its own genre alongside the “cop drama,” “legal drama” and even “forensic drama” (thanks CSI and your thousand spin-offs). I really shouldn’t have been worried, though, because besides the hiccup that was Trust Me (which I myself am guilty of giving too good a review to… even though it wasn’t that great), TNT has been rock-solid with its original programming, a trend that continues here with Hawthorne, a “medical drama,” yes, but with a much different focus.

Hawthorne focuses on the nursing corps of Richmond Trinity Hospital in Richmond, Virginia and mainly on the hospital’s chief nursing officer, Christina Hawthorne (Jada Pinkett Smith), a nurse that goes far beyond the call of duty every day to ensure the wellbeing of her patients, something we see right away in the opening moments of the pilot. We open on Hawthorne, unable to sleep and talking to the ashes of her late husband, on the one-year anniversary of his death from cancer. She’s interrupted by a phone call and when she rushes right over to the hospital – and after a nice little exchange with the moody night security guard – she dashes up to the roof to find a patient on the ledge, ready to give up his fight with cancer and jump… and he was also a friend of Hawthorne’s late husband as well. And that’s just the start of her day, a day she was supposed to have off due to the anniversary of her husband’s death.

We take a rather interesting trip through this day with Hawthorne as we see how true she is to doing the right thing, even if it means stepping on a few toes to get it done, including the Chief of Surgery at the hospital, Tom Wakefield (Michael Vartain), who Hawthorne has an interesting relationship with, sometimes confrontational but always respectful. Probably the only thing I was a bit sketchy of was how they kind of turn the doctors into bad guys here, casting a lot of M.D.’s as cranky, whiny snobs who are never around and the nurses as these overworked saints, almost. Granted, I haven’t really been around doctors much lately (knock on wood), so this could very well be the case, but it’s a bit odd, coming off of all these shows where doctors are almost-heroes to portraying them as these snotty pricks who favor their reputation over their patients welfare. One of the main through-lines in the pilot deals with a male nurse named Ray Stein (David Julian Hirsh), who obviously struggles with being a male nurse, and clashes with a female doctor who he tried to warn about a dosage of meds for a patient, but follows the orders anyway… and almost kills the patient. They do set up some really slick drama here in this first episode, but it just feels to me that some of the doctors could be portrayed in a different light without taking away from the focus of the show.

Acting-wise, we get quite a nice little cast here backing up Jada Pinkett Smith. Michael Vartan does a fine job as Tom Wakefield, the Chief of Surgery at the hospital who has an odd penchant for giving candy to patients. Suleka Miathew performs nicely here as well as Bobbie Jackson, one of Hawthorne’s nurses and close friends, David Julian Hirsh as Ray Stein, who struggles with being a male nurse and also struggles at getting the attention of the lovely female nurse, Candy Sullivan, played by Christina Moore, who… well, lets just say treats some of her patients very very well. While we don’t see much of her in the pilot, Hannah Hodson does a slick job as Camille, Hawthorne’s young and rebellious daughter and we also get a special guest star with Joanna Cassidy who plays Amanda, Hawthorne’s mother-in-law who also sits on the hospital’s board and we also get some sense that Amanda blames Hawthorne for the death of her son. I also enjoyed Vanessa Lengies’ (who you may remember as the underage hottie hostess in Waiting) Kelly Epson character, a new nurse that doesn’t quite have her wits about her yet… and has some very bad luck in the process as well, which provides for a bit of comic relief here and there that I’m sure will continue on in the series. But, of course, most of the action revolves around Jada Pinkett Smith as Christina Hawthorne, and I have to say she does a damn fine job in this heavy role. Pinkett Smith does a wonderful job showing very subtly the kind of toll her hectic job takes on her, but also her pride that won’t allow anyone else to help her. It’s a very rich and complex character that any actress would kill to play, but only a few could pull off… and Jada Pinkett Smith certainly proves here that she’s in deft command of this wonderful character. We get a nice duality to this character as well, because she’s most definitely in control at the hospital, but when she’s at home she talks to the urn with her husband’s ashes, even a year after his death. I’m quite intrigued to see where they’ll take all of these characters throughout the season.

Hawthrone seems to be yet another winner for TNT. It’s a compelling show that gives us some great characters to explore, puts a new twist on the “medical drama” genre, and provides a fine showcase for Jada Pinkett Smith, who shines brighter than ever here.