TV is the New Reading

TNT's 'Hawthorne' is done -- at least for now

This week marked what TNT optimistically called a season finale of Jada Pinkett Smith's "Hawthorne," featuring the lead character actually gasp! doing something wrong.

"Hawthorne" has focused largely around the work of Nurse Christina Hawthorne, head of nursing at Richmond Trinity, and how wonderful she is. Basically, the administration, the doctors, the support staff, no one knows what's going on. She and her nursing staff are the ones who notice that patients are getting the wrong medications or are taking unnecessary medical risks. They're the ones who put a higher priority on giving a grieving but fearful son more time to say goodbye to his mother over the very clear end-of-life directives of the mother and her family. They're the ones who will keep a homeless woman's child out of the foster system because they personally disapprove of it and everyone involved in seeing that the child get the developmental care he needs is evil.

Because at Richmond Trinity, the nurses are the only ones who care.

Yes, Nurse Hawthorne and her headstrong staff of nurses are the only health care professionals in the entire hospital who really care about the patients, even though they're all really busy coping with their own personal foibles. The social services coordinator (played just really badly by Rebecca Field) does her job and transfers an infant into foster care without first tracking down Isabel, the homeless crazy person who mothered him. She's sympathetic -- a screaming, crying, desolate mother tends to be -- but to be perfectly fair, there is this whole other hospital to run and other infants to care for and protocols to meet.

I'll just point out this is the same Isabel who got it in her head to steal the incredibly expensive titanium prosthetic leg from Nurse Bobbi, the one-legged nurse who let her stay overnight at her place -- she don't know, she just wanna borrow it o sumthin and then she gave it to another guy who give it to anudder guy and he sole it on ebay and she just couldn't get it back! She's really sorry, please forgive her! So Bobbi forgives her but Bobbi is still in the wrong for regretting her decision to let Isabel overnight at her place in the first place.

You know what? Isabel's chemical imbalances make her a sympathetic character when they don't make her a hilarious character but she's broken so much trust here she does not get to play that "you hurt my feelings" card.

And what's with this male nurse, Ray, played by David Hirsch? First, there's just one, and like Field he wears way too much makeup. He's crushing madly on Hot Blonde Nurse Candi (who shows truly hands-on appreciation for our nation's servicemen) but his life is so wacky he ends up sleeping with one of the doctors instead. He's played so entirely for laughs it just grates on the nerves. Hirsch reminds me of the CPA brother on "Royal Pains," and I hate the CPA brother on "Royal Pains."

But back to Nurse Hawthorne actually making a mistake. She inappropriately used her mother-in-law's influence to get D.B. Woodside, an old friend with stage-4 and therefore ineligible cancer into a clinical study, bumping another patient with stage-2 and therefore eligible cancer, which Hunky Surgeon Wakefield had gotten into the study. It all came down to a dithery lab tech who made the switch and then oh my gawd Lucy you got some splainin' to do.

In the end, a couple of "sorry's" here and there smoothed everything over, and Hawthorne's not to blame because once more she was only guilty of caring too much.

Each week she and her staff have a run-in with an inhuman administrator, a know-it-all doctor (who's always in the wrong) or a flustered, racist patient or some uncaring bureaucrat and Nurse Hawthorne finds a way to divide loaves and fishes to feed a multitude and come off smelling like a rose. No actual hospital could possibly run like this. Hawthorne's so magical by all medical logic she should be glowing and that's not even taking into account her Supermom status, raising a headstrong, forthright teenager and undermined at every turn by the doting grandmother, her late husband's mom. Oh yes, along with being beautiful and brilliant and master of her domain she's a widow, too. She's got everything under control.

I say turn her loose on this health care crisis. Choirs of angels will herald the dawn of a new era in which no one even gets sick.

Except maybe for me.

'Project Runway'

Closing us out, “Project Runway” opened its sixth season on Lifetime this weekend and I didn’t have a thing to worry about. True, they’re all in LA now, but it’s still helmed by the magnificent Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, and judges Michael Kors and Nina Garcia made the trip as well. They’re still shopping at Mood for their fabrics, they’re still creating some wild and wonderful designs in a really short period of time and showing some magnificent creativity straight out of the gate. From what I saw the new season is off to a great start and working just fine.

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