Moore provides comic relief on new TNT drama 'HawthoRNe'

As a comedienne, Christina Moore didn't get the usual improvisational training through a sketch group like the Second City or the Groundlings. Instead, she found herself developing her comic chops in retelling crazy college stories from her days at Illinois Wesleyan on visits back home to her family in Palatine.

The stories were sometimes bittersweet, sometimes almost tragic, but she got a rise out of people by giving them a comic flair.

"And I thought, 'I get it. I can do this with an audience and make it funny,'" Moore says.

That's just what she does in TNT's new hospital series, "HawthoRNe." Although designed as a star vehicle for Jada Pinkett Smith, who plays the title character Christina Hawthorne (without the fey capitalized "RN"), chief nurse at a Virginia hospital, it features Moore in a comic-relief role as nurse Candy Sullivan.

"I've always liked something that has a tiny bit of a sense of humor," Moore says, on the phone from her home in Southern California. "I'm not a real serious person, and I tend to bring that to whatever I do. So I like the fact that there was a little mystery - what's going on with Candy? - and also I felt like there was a lightness to her, and that made me excited."

Part of the mystery stems from how she has a relatively small part in the pilot when it premieres at 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 16, on TNT. As a night nurse who doles out "a little extra TLC," she's basically just there at the beginning and the end. The writers and producers see to it that the first couple episodes mainly establish Pinkett's character and her supporting cast. Yet Moore soon transcends any kind of eye-candy stereotype.

"They made it very clear it was going to turn into an ensemble, and that's exactly what has happened," Moore says. "That quickly changes. That develops into other things, and I get my own patients and my own story lines."

The pilot also hints at a budding romance, more of a conflict relationship at first, between Candy and David Julian Hirsh's male nurse Ray Stein.

"He and I are constantly joking that we're making a different movie from everyone else," Moore says. "We're making the romantic-comedy movie, where everyone else is on 'House,' a serious medical drama."

Not that Candy doesn't get seriously involved from time to time. "There is no part of her that is just a twit or just a foil for Ray's affections," she adds. "She really is a great nurse. But the story with her and Ray is what I think we're trying to hook the audience with."

They've just finished shooting the sixth episode, and "I can't wait to get the next script," Moore says, "because they've really taken it in a direction I did not see coming."

Sort of like her career as a whole. Immediately after graduating from Wesleyan, she transplanted to Los Angeles to pursue acting. She had a couple of dramatic successes early on, including the WB series "Hyperion Bay," then went through something of a drought. She made use of the down time by helping to form an all-woman sketch group, which did include alumnae from the Groundlings. It gave her the background she might otherwise have gotten at a place like Second City.

"That's what led me to be on 'MadTV,'" Moore says, "and once I'd been on 'MadTV' it's like you've gotten your comedy knighthood."

She was on "Mad TV" in 2003, working alongside former Second City trouper Stephnie Weir. She left that to fill the role of Laurie Forman for a season of "That '70s Show," then went on to work with Chicago-area products Jenny McCarthy on "The Bad Girl's Guide" and DuPage County's Gail O'Grady on "Hot Properties."

"I think there is a commonality when you come from a similar place," Moore says, "and the Midwest, especially Chicago, is so deeply rooted and makes people I think very smart and very friendly and very fun to work with."

Her family moved away from Palatine after she went to Wesleyan, but she still tries to make it to Chicago every once in a while to see old friends, usually in July. "I don't come in the winter," Moore says. "Can't do it." Those Midwestern roots, it seems, froze up long ago.

<p class="News">'HawthoRNe'</p> <p class="News">8 p.m. Tuesday, June 16, on TNT</p> <p class="News"><b>Starring:</b> Jada Pinkett Smith and Palatine native Christina Moore</p>