• Hawthorne, 9-10 p.m. Tuesday, TNT

Timing is everything. Two weeks ago, a new drama about a rebellious nurse fighting arrogant doctors and a stifling hospital bureaucracy while sorting through a messy domestic life might have seemed like an intriguingly fresh perspective on the medical show. But that was BNJ -- Before Nurse Jackie. So now it's like, are any of the nurses vampires? Does the maternity ward have a dancing baby? Because otherwise, been there, done that.

That's the unfortunate situation facing TNT's Hawthorne, which arrives a week late and an Edie Falco short. What might have otherwise been a worthy effort seems pallid and wheezing compared to the acid-etched Nurse Jackie.

Not that Jada Pinkett Smith doesn't give an earnest and at times affecting performance as Christina Hawthorne, the headstrong nursing chief at an overworked and underfunded urban hospital.

Still emotionally bereft from the death of her husband a year earlier, heckled at home by a smart-mouth daughter and an imperious mother-in-law, Christina channels her grief into an endless struggle against a hospital management whose sole passions are budget-cutting and butt-covering.

The dubious rewards for her largely futile efforts range from patients jumping off the roof to getting arrested in the lobby, but Christina is peculiarly comforted by living on the edge. When an administrator frets that ''I can't jeopardize my job,'' Christina retorts: ``I do it practically every day, and I have to tell you, it gets really easy once you get in the habit.''

But Hawthorne is too often marred by glossy medical-drama clichés, from hormonally overcharged characters (one concludes her official report of the overnight shift with the smirky observation that ''six nurses think that Nick the paramedic is really hot'') to Christina's incessant chatter with the urn containing her husband's ashes.

And even at its best, a weird sense of deja vu floats over Hawthorne. Christina bantering with a schizophrenic homeless woman on the sidewalk outside the hospital? Didn't I see that before? Umm, yeah, on Nurse Jackie last week. Maybe Pinkett Smith's next series will be about the Apollo space program -- she's already got some experience playing the second woman on the moon.

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