Routine case of medical drama

You would think that into a vacuum, greatness would rush. At a time when so many groundbreaking shows -- “ER,” “The Shield,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Boston Legal” -- have triumphantly concluded, you would imagine networks killing themselves to come up with the next innovation. Instead we get “HawthoRNe.”

To create a power-trifecta of female leads, TNT has asked Jada Pinkett Smith to join Holly Hunter of “Saving Grace” and Kyra Sedgwick of “The Closer” as Christina Hawthorne, a recently widowed head nurse at Richmond Trinity Hospital. Balancing her grief, her rebellious teenage daughter and, of course, her bottomless capacity to care, Christina constantly battles with doctors who don’t respect her, patients who desperately need her, and the crazy pace of a city hospital.

Following fast on the heels of Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie,” “HawthoRNe” (which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday) covers some of the same themes but in strangely unapologetically risk-free manner. With a sensibility neither Housian (Pinkett Smith is no comedian, sardonic or otherwise) nor Greysian (there’s some early dating among the staff, but no action in the supply closet), writer and producer John Masius (“Providence,” “Dead Like Me”) seems to think groundbreaking is overrated. Except for Pinkett Smith being a black woman, two descriptors still rare in a lead character, “HawthoRNe” nestles cozily right smack in the middle of either the box or the envelope, depending on your cliche preference.

Now this may have been a conscious decision, a form of firmly placid protest of the current frenzied and often gratuitous emphasis put on pace-shifting and quirkiness. But “character-driven” shouldn’t mean boring, and the front-loading of righteous pro-nurse speechifying by Christina doesn’t do “HawthoRNe” any favors; when a show makes “Saving Grace” seem subtle in terms of message delivery, you know you’re in trouble.

Pinkett Smith does her best to quickly establish Christina as a sad, tough, competent rule-breaker with the obligatory broken heart of gold. She tries to talk a cancer patient from a suicidal jump, then saves his life when she fails. She tries to talk her daughter Camille (Hannah Hodson) out of trouble with the principal, then leaves the child to her fate when Camille mouths off. In the way of medical dramas, Christina performs duties that would normally be left to surgeons, social services and security, none of whom are up to her standards.

She is much kinder to the mentally challenged homeless than she is to the doctors, all of whom are portrayed in varying degrees of wrongheaded arrogance (except Michael Vartan’s Dr. Wakefield, who has a crush on Christina) and one of whom, regrettably, speaks a sort of pidgin English that is a running joke with the nurses and the show.

There are the odd moments -- that Christina’s best friend, Bobbie (a scene-stealing Suleka Mathew), has an artificial leg is revealed in a darkly humorous way -- and overarching familial tensions -- Joanna Cassidy plays the rich and witchy mother-in-law, Amanda -- but in the first few episodes these don’t seem to add up to much.

Maybe it’s that the tough and pretty rule-breaker needs something fresher than widowhood to hold our attention. Maybe the patients are too by-the-book -- Cloris Leachman is wasted as a crabby old lady who requires a lecture on respecting nurses. Maybe it’s because the blond nurse is named Candy (Christina Moore) and offers “special services” to injured soldiers (yes, that was the sound of me screaming).

Or maybe it’s that the one male nurse (David Julian Hirsh) is assumed to be gay. (Me screaming, again.) Maybe it’s that the show is supposed to be set in Richmond but no one sounds as if they’ve ever even visited Virginia.

Whatever the reason, I found myself thinking less about the characters -- oh, Christina’s so pretty, but she’s so sad and tough, and her daughter’s a royal pain, but then, you know, she just lost her father -- than I did about the enormous amount of work that goes into making a television show. The endless rewrites and the casting process, the long hours on the set, the costume department, the set designers, the location managers, the days in the editing room. I even found myself thinking about all those electricians hauling the heavy lights around, carefully taping down the miles and miles of electrical cord. Everyone working so hard, everyone talented and professional and doing their very best to make this a terrific television show, and it just isn’t.

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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com