Jackie’s back. Love or hate her, Nurse Jackie is being rebooted on Amazon Prime this year, with star Edie Falco to return. Join me, a practicing ER nurse, for a look back on the original series and its approach to its main character, the real-life job of being a nurse, and our healthcare system.

Nurses have long struggled to own their leading character energy in media and pop culture. We’re usually sidelined by narratives featuring physicians or residents or played as one of a handful of worn-out tropes. Nurse Ratched

is a deranged, controlling battle-axe. ‘MAS*H’s’ Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan is an object of the male characters’ sexual thirst despite her incredible professional military accomplishments. And Greg Focker is essentially one feature film-length male-nurse joke in ‘Meet the Parents.’ Men in nursing! [covers mouth and ‘tee-hees.’]

But that’s if we make it into the foreground at all. Often, nurses are simply the blue-scrubbed, slightly out-of-focus ambient background action for almost every medical show ever made. And while nurses quite literally run the US healthcare system, you’d never know that by watching us portrayed in film and television.

Meet ER Nurse Jackie Peyton

Then, Jackie Peyton. Showtime’s wildly successful show, ‘Nurse Jackie,’ featured an NYC registered emergency department nurse as its main protagonist. Jackie appeared in nearly every scene of the show’s almost 100-episode run, single-handedly carrying the entire seven-season story arc from beginning to end. Jackie entered the chat, dominated it, and helped redefine the image of modern nursing for the U.S. public. Audiences devoured the show; over a million people watched the pilot episode, which was immediately purchased for a second season. All eyes were on nursing. Boom. We had arrived. Nurses, the nation over, rejoiced.

Not. It turns out that Jackie didn’t sit well with the real nurses. There was backlash—a lot of it. Many criticized heavily the show’s portrayal of Jackie as a person with an addiction and her tendency toward, I’ll say…eccentric professional behavior. They claimed it would sully the image of the nation’s most trusted profession and derail young folks from pursuing nursing as a career. Professional organizations even released a “statement of disappointment” and lobbied for a disclaimer before the show’s opening credits, warning viewers the show was not an accurate representation of the nursing profession. Organizations lost that fight, but they were decidedly un-team Jackie. They wanted a more wholesome representation, a more respectable, professional vision of an American nurse: more Taylor Swift, less Amy Winehouse.

Me? I’m team Jackie. I’m team Jackie, captain. Maybe I’m biased here because I’ve had a massive gay-to-straight crush on Edie Falco and her no-nonsense, steely feminine demeanor since her ‘Soprano’ days, but I think Jackie was a great rep for nursing’s brand. Was she a perfect nurse? Hell no. Was she a good nurse? I think so. It depends on how you view nursing’s role in the modern healthcare system. What she was, unabashedly, was human. And that’s how we want the public to see us. Too often, nurses are held to impossibly high professional and personal standards. We’re branded as ‘superheroes,’ capable of—and expected to—shoulder immense societal burden at the expense of our self-fulfillment. Superheroes, however, are notoriously impossible to relate to.

Nurse Jackie was Infallible

Jackie was not a superhero by any stretch of the most vivid imagination. She lied, stole, had affairs, yelled at people, disposed of body parts in toilets, berated public school counselors, was cagey about her personal life, and snorted enough Vicodin & Percocet to take down Lebron James. At the same time, Jackie was resilient, highly skilled, intelligent, hardworking, generous, kind, empathetic, and dedicated. She was human, and she was messy. She was an imperfect person trying to do good in an imperfect system; that kind of honest representation is good for nursing.

It strips away the scrubs, the clinical titles, and the professional mission statements and leaves just the human. We want people to understand that we make mistakes like they do, that our patience is limited, and that we get tired and angry sometimes. We want them to know that we are subject to the same kinds of temptations they are. Our humanity makes us relatable, it makes us real. The show wouldn’t have worked if Jackie had been a perfect professional or human. People would have been bored or felt preached to. 

Watching the characters struggle and Jackie struggles a lot is compelling. She struggled with addiction, with relationships, and with the truth. Beyond creating a nuanced and fascinating character, witnessing these struggles also gives the audience a more honest picture of what modern nursing is truly like. It’s hard. It’s hard working twelve-hour shifts on your feet. Holding compassion for patients, colleagues, family members, friends, and yourself is hard. And being nice to people who aren’t nice to you is hard. Some shortcuts are inevitable, some vices too seductive, and Jackie falls prey to both. But her indiscretions and free-fall into addiction allow the audience a richer appreciation of nurses and the work they do. They provide a much-needed contrast to the ‘not all superheroes wear capes’ trope, which says that nurses should do hard work no one else wants to do and do it with little meaningful recognition. This expectation leads so many real-life nurses to burn out or make choices similar to Jackie’s. Instead, witnessing Jackie’s struggles and failures offers audiences a more relatable image of modern nurses, an image they can empathize with. Empathy and honest representation are the only way forward if we want professional progress.

If we want perfection, we should turn away from Jackie. But if we want to see ourselves onscreen in a more honest, sometimes uncomfortable, and human way, we should embrace her. Her spirit represented what nursing should be—advocacy, intelligence, and compassion. Her greatest strength, though, was her humanity. Humanity should be the goal when depicting nurses in media because a rosy professional identity alone can’t tell effective stories; only people can do that.

I’m excited to see how they bring Jackie back.

Check Back Next Monday: Part 2: The Job

The post Nurse Jackie Revival: A Nurse’s Insightful Perspective – Part 1: Jackie first appeared on Daily Nurse.