NEW SERIES!
DRAMA
Returning to TV, Jada Pinkett Smith plays Christina Hawthorne, head nurse at a hospital in Richmond, Va. It's a fairly standard role in the hospital-heroic mold: Christina, recently widowed with a teenage daughter, isn't afraid to challenge authority and so on. Yet Pinkett Smith (who also executive-produced) gives a quiet, sensitive performance. She's attractively sympathetic. (Joanna Cassidy contrasts nicely with her as Christina's bristlingly powerful mother-in-law.) You wonder, though, whether in a real hospital nurse Christina would even be able to make herself heard over the low rumble of gurney wheels. Nurse Jackie she is not.
