Hawthorne doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to be. The first season of this TNT medical series, which stars Jada Pinkett Smith as chief nursing office Christina Hawthorne, spends so much time trying to be jack of all trades, it winds up being master of none. Dalliances with comedy are woefully unfunny – the ensemble cast leans too heavily on stereotypical characters and, in Pinkett Smith, the show struggles under a matriarchal figure that lacks any believable sense of humor or empathy. As a drama, it’s too obvious – the storylines stink of rejected Grey’s Anatomy scripts – and doesn’t credit its audience with any intelligence. Every plot development is laboriously spelled out, presumably for any toddlers watching, and storylines that are supposed to intersect merely distract one another from anything close to coherence. Such dominance is accorded to Pinkett Smith as the show’s ‘star,’ that the writers appear unwilling to let other characters carry any of the dramatic (or, indeed, comedic) weight alone. And if the alpha female isn’t up to the task, the show falls apart like a poorly applied splint. “You know you don’t have to get in the middle of everything, right?” says fellow nurse Bobbie Jackson to Christina, as the latter agonizes over just how much to meddle in her latest case. The creators of Hawthorne show no such common sense.