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The nurse will see you now
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November 9, 2009
By Lara de Matos
Being married to one of the most powerful men in Tinseltown can do wonders for your public profile (just ask the current Mrs Tom Cruise).
It can also be a sure-fire way of sending you straight down the path of overshadowed sidekick. Especially if you happen to share the same profession.
With a less-than-stellar singing career, directorial efforts that have gone completely unnoticed and dud flicks like The Nutty Professor listed among her main movie highlights, sadly, Jada Pinkett Smith falls in the latter category.
Meanwhile, over the years, her husband Will has gone from gangly box-haircut geek on The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air to the only actor in history to have eight consecutive films gross more than $100-million (about R700-million) in their opening week.
Throw in the fact that Will has also flourished as a rapper and songwriter, as well as film producer, and you have yourself a bona fide superstar.
Still, her obvious beauty aside, Jada would hardly have managed to hold on to Will for more than a decade now (what with those all-too-eager groupies always circling in the shadows), if she didn't have a steely, no-nonsense side to her.
And it's this trait that she brings to her latest project, Hawthorne. Pinkett plays the title role, Christina Hawthorne, in this medical drama, which sees the attention shift from self-important doctors to the true worker bees within a hospital - the nurses.
The New York Times describes head nurse Christina as "a beautiful young widow, a devoted mother and a fierce, selfless champion of the patients and her overworked, underappreciated nursing staff", adding: "In Hawthorne, Pinkett Smith is quite convincing as a spitfire who tramples over rules and regulations (and even, in the premiere, a security guard) to reach her goals. She is a petite actress with a fearsome glare - the better to quell naysayers who get in her way - but there are also glimmers of charm beneath her regal good looks."
That said, the show has received mixed reviews, mainly because of what critics describe as its "busy, but not particularly distinctive take... on this well-travelled genre", with one commentator even going so far as to state: "Hawthorne's constant heated holier-than-thou exchanges grow tedious quickly, and a recurring gag about an unintelligible Asian doctor is borderline offensive."
The point about Christina's goodie-two-shoes approach is made all the more apparent when compared to another nurse-oriented programme airing alongside Hawthorne in the US. Unlike her saintly counterpart, in the black dramedy Nurse Jackie, Jackie Peyton's preferred MO invariably involves antics along the lines of snorting crushed Percocet tablets, or bouncing a man's severed ear down a toilet bowl. And that Jackie is portrayed by the feisty former Soprano, Edie Falco, only serves to augment the must-watch factor.
By hey, at least Hawthorne can count on Michael Vartan (who provides the love interest element) for a touch of that same must-watch ingredient, even if only for the female viewers.
Nevertheless, that the show has hardly made the strongest of impressions makes one wonder why M-Net didn't simply opt to slot the audience favourite (and fellow series-set-amid-hospital corridors), Private Practice into the primetime Monday night slot... It certainly would have saved them all this dilly-dallying with alternative programmes, which apparently, are proving to be somewhat second-rate.
Hawthorne starts tonight on M-Net at 7.30pm.
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