HawthoRNe premiered … and I yawned

I really wanted to like the HawthoRNe season two premiere. Not love it necessarily, but like it.

I admire Jada Pinkett Smith, who plays widowed nurse Christina Hawthorne. I’ve liked Michael Vartan, who plays surgeon Tom Wakefield, since his Alias days. Plus there’s James Morrison — who played Bill on 24 and William on Private Practice — as their boss John Morrissey. All of this was good casting, which initially prompted me to tune in during its freshman season last year.

That first season was okay — I watched it all the way through — but it suffered in comparison to the other new nursing/hospital drama which started at the same time, Nurse Jackie, starring Edie Falco. Pinkett Smith’s Hawthorne was the anti-Jackie, very moral and good and heroic (almost saint-like), as she mourned her husband and raised her teenaged daughter, while doing (almost) whatever it took to help her patients. (She’d never go to the lengths that Nurse Jackie would.) And when Vartan’s Wakefield was clearly attracted to Hawthorne, the romantic tension was decent.

But last night’s rushed and forced season premiere left me cold and unentertained. In the episode’s opening moments, we learned that Hawthorne’s “good” hospital, Richmond Trinity, had gone belly-up financially, and most of the staff was going to the “bad” hospital, James River, run by horrifically insensitive, almost over-the-top incompetents … or at least when it came to the nursing staff. Clearly and unsubtly, the Richmond Trinity refugees are supposed to be the good ones, and the James River folks are supposed to be the bad ones. Though both Hawthorne and Wakefield had job opportunities elsewhere, they decided to work at the “bad” hospital so Hawthorne could, of course, rescue it, and Wakefield could keep on wooing her.

There was some good raw material that could’ve been thought-provoking and interesting, but it was enveloped by badly written, ham-handed story twists.

The way in which Hawthorne wound up at James River seemed improbable. She and Wakefield were seeing off Richmond Trinity’s last patient, when a man with a bleeding gunshot wound approached them. They drove like mad to James River where Wakefield, who announced that he had admitting privileges there, rushed the man into surgery. Within hours, Hawthorne was offered the post of James Rivers’ director of nursing by her old boss so she could right the wrongs there. In short order, she was given a waiting room to use as a makeshift office and, almost as if by magic, boxes and boxes of her stuff from her Richmond Trinity office were delivered to her new digs at James River.

Oh, and the overtly “bad” head of nursing at James River, Gail Strummer — the one who let a dead body lie around unattended when the morgue was full — was kept on staff to share the director of nursing gig with Hawthorne even though Strummer had just allowed a woman to writhe with severe abdominal pain for five hours in the crowded ER waiting area because Strummer thought she was exaggerating her symptoms in order to jump the line. That patient died, after her desperate boyfriend called 911 in an attempt to get her medical attention, after he freaked out at Strummer’s callous behavior and angrily shoved a male staffer, a decision for which Strummer had the guy arrested.

Now the season’s set up to have Hawthorne the Good face off against Strummer the Bad.

All of this left me very disappointed. If the next episode doesn’t improve, I don’t know that I’ll be tuning in because it was too painful. If you watched the season two premiere, what did you think?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Jun 23, 2010 @ 13:00 EST5EDT