Nurse Jackie and the politics of care

This essay considers Nurse Jackie, one of several recent television shows, including HawthoRNe, and Mercy, that features a nurse as the main character. All 3 shows premiered in 2009 and challenged nursing’s longstanding invisibility and misrepresentation on television. Although the plots of each show corrected problematic aspects of nursing’s usual media representation, only Nurse Jackie remains on the air. In this paper, I analyze why Nurse Jackie succeeded where the other 2 shows did not, considering the representational politics of care on television and in the national context where health care remains a significant concern.