Fall 2023 TV Overview! Despite the Hollywood strikes, good portrayals of nursing are coming on the BBC’s Call the Midwife and on Netflix’s Virgin River. But when more shows appear, the prime-time landscape will likely…
Tag: nurse portrayal
Doc McStuffins
Each episode of Doc McStuffins sends a basic health message, usually in a narrow, physician-centric “diagnosis and treatment” framework. But wait! One of the dolls, Hallie the Hippo, is “Doc’s nurse.” At different points the Hallie character reflects most of the major nursing stereotypes, from low-skilled handmaiden to motherly angel to crusty battle-axe. Her main job often seems to be fetching the Big Book of Boo-Boos for Doc. . The show’s creator has noted that she originally saw the Hallie character as a “fumbling, bumbling mess,”
Absolute beginners
The show began airing in the U.S. in December 2020. It has five main characters, and all are new hospital nurses. Each one shows real health knowledge and operates with some autonomy—but not when physicians are present. And without an expert, authoritative major nurse character, Nurses seems to be a missed opportunity.
Raising Cain
The fourth season of the hospital drama, which aired in summer 2017, still included the competent emergency nurse Kenny. But as always, every other major character was a physician. And even more than in the past, the show portrayed nurses as mere assistants to the physicians, with limited skills and no autonomy—especially in an egregious plotline in which a seemingly gifted nurse turned out to be a physician.
Is the truth out there?
Netflix’s School Nurse Files presents a nurse as quirky paranormal protector As part of Netflix’s apparent effort to present nurse characters who are as different from each other as possible, school nurse…
Gotta keep ‘em from killing people
Nurses show skill and some authority in early seasons of Chicago Med The first two seasons of the NBC hospital drama (2015-2017) focus on physician characters who generally direct clinical care. But…
Pretending it’s a whiz kid world
CBS’s Pure Genius saw the future of hospital care–and it was an exclusive boutique! The futuristic hospital drama, which ended in 2017, offered a hopeful vision of care in which superstar physicians…
She’s too good for you
Grey’s Anatomy is a little bit sorry about that “skanky syph nurse” thing In the ABC show’s 14th season, Nurse Olivia returned with some verbal payback for surgeon Alex Karev. But the…