It’s an unwritten rule of show business: Don’t follow a hot act. Treat Williams’ new series, “Heartland” (9 p.m., TNT), a perfunctory and noble medical soap opera, follows Kyra Sedgwick in the third-season opener of “The Closer” (8 p.m., TNT). “Heartland” pales in comparison.

It’s hard to be a complicated doctor in the age of “House.” Williams (“Everwood”) plays Nathaniel Grant, a tireless transplant surgeon. He’s a divorced workaholic with one peculiar tick: Grant sees dead people, or at least he thinks he does. Sometimes, in a certain light, he sees the image of the deceased donor instead of the face of the lucky recipient.

But this isn’t what keeps him up at night. He just cares so darn much! When’s he’s not riddled with compassion and angst, Grant is fending off amorous advances from shapely nurses.

This comes as no surprise to his ex-wife, Kate (Kari Matchett). And wouldn’t you know it, Kate works in the very same hospital coordinating transplants. They’re together all of the time!

If Matchett looks familiar, she recently played the vice president’s mistress/betrayer on “24.” Before that, she was an alien schemer on “Invasion.” She has a much more benign role here, convincing the bereaved to donate the organs of their departed loved ones. After “Heartland,” you’ll never think of a picnic cooler in quite the same way.

¢ As “The Closer” returns, Sedgwick’s tempestuous character, Brenda Johnson, has plenty of reasons to be ticked off. And we love when she’s ticked off. A family has just been slaughtered in their own home. To top that, Assistant Police Chief Will Pope (J.K. Simmons, “Oz”) is riding hard on her to cut her budget and downsize her department.

You have to love a show that has the police force operating on a budget. This would never happen on Jerry Bruckheimer’s “CSI.”

If “The Closer” has a fault, it is the arguments between Brenda and her boyfriend and his worries about finding a new home or at least room for all of his stuff. These scenes seem like an afterthought.

¢ A tennis-playing Lothario gets to choose between women in their 20s or women in their 40s on the new reality spectacle “Age of Love” (8 p.m., NBC). What if they broadcast a dating show and nobody cared?

Tonight’s other highlights

¢ Julius rushes to redeem expiring trading stamps on “Everybody Hates Chris” (7 p.m., CW).

¢ Contestants cook for a military contingent on “Hell’s Kitchen” (8 p.m., Fox).

¢ A divorced woman and cancer survivor gets hug therapy on “Ex-Wives’ Club” (8 p.m., ABC).

¢ Scholar and author Simon Schama profiles the pioneers, troublemakers and visionaries who changed culture on the eight-part series “Simon Schama’s Power of Art” (8 p.m., PBS). Tonight: Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso.

¢ Scheduled on “Dateline” (9 p.m., NBC): an interview with England’s princes-in-waiting.

¢ “Making the Band” (9 p.m., MTV) returns for a fourth season.