TV is the New Reading

TNT's 'Nurse Hawthorne' good -- perhaps a little too good

Jada Pinkett Smith’s Nurse Christina Hawthorne has a hole in her life.

About a year ago, she became a widow when her much beloved husband died of cancer and she either didn’t or couldn’t revive him.

Her mother-in-law has it in for her, blaming her in some unspecified way for what happened. And her teenage daughter is just as judgmental.

The moment she shares with his urn in the closing moments of the pilot episode before she has to send his remains to his mother was as solid an illustration as anything that she still feels his loss deeply.

So when his best friend, a cancer patient, chooses the anniversary of his death to try to end his own life by leaping from the rooftop of the hospital where Hawthorne works, she’s completely thrown.

Of course, he woke her up in the middle of the night to tell her he was doing it, and then waited until she arrived to make the jump. Because she was there she got him the care he needed to stabilize his condition, but remembered too late he might have signed a “do not resuscitate” form. So while the doctors are try to save his life, she goes looking for the form.

If she finds it, she doesn’t bring it to them. The friend lives. And what’s more, he said he’s glad he did, despite the fact he’s now survived a five-story fall and has banged himself up pretty badly in the process.

Nurse Hawthorne is also trying to admit a baby brought to her by a homeless woman. As Christina tries to admit the child, the woman assaults her repeatedly. And indeed it just seems like she’s a run-of-the-mill crazy person, but ultimately she has to be admitted as well -- for post-delivery hemorrhaging. It was, in fact, her child.

Add in a pretty nurse who provides a special “thank you” to our servicemen and another nurse on her staff who follows a doctor’s orders for administering medication he knows will harm the patient -- and the feckless physician deflects all blame back onto the nurse -- and nurses on her staff trying desperately to understand doctors with especially thick foreign accents and other nurses pursuing relationships with young residents and it’s all go at Hawthorne’s hospital.

The fact that Christina Hawthorne doesn’t curl up in a ball from all of this physical and emotional pain, trauma and turmoil spinning around her in every direction is a testimony to the emotional stability she brings to her own task as head nurse in a trauma response center.

She defends the nurse who followed the bad prescription to the physician calling for that nurse’s head, but then confronts him -- he’s a male nurse, and no, the patients don’t completely get that either -- about using his best judgment in providing patient care.

Hawthorne is less interested in rules than she is in providing the best care she can, and ultimately that’s the force of this story.

Because whatever happened between her husband and herself a year or so ago, it has all but made her a saint. Nurse Hawthorne is a little too good to be true, but there’s enough drama to carry the show, and indeed, when pushed, she’s perfectly willing to push back. Plus, as we’ve seen in other hospital dramas, the nurses have ways to get even if they ever feel underappreciated.

“Nurse Hawthorne” airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on TNT.