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Nurses preps for return on Global, after over a year of waiting

Canadian medical drama had a first-season run few could've predicted.

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The timing for Global’s homegrown medical drama Nurses couldn’t have been better. The series scrubbed in last January and wrapped up its first season in March 2020 — just before the reality of working in a hospital would upend anything we’d seen before on TV.

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The show was familiar, a medical ensemble in the vein of Grey’s Anatomy that centres on five nurses at a downtown Toronto hospital. It starred Tiera Skovbye, Natasha Calis, Jordan Johnson-Hinds, Sandy Sidhu and Donald MacLean Jr., and it had much of the same creative team as fellow Global series Rookie Blue, including that show’s co-creator Tassie Cameron.

Then the pandemic changed everything. The television industry in Canada and the U.S. ground to a halt. Networks in the U.S. were scrambling. With preparations for new fall shows on hold indefinitely, and only a few months before their annual unveiling of the new season’s lineup, they looked outside their borders for content.

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The CW picked up CBC’s Coroner and NBC grabbed CTV’s Transplant, also a medical drama, before snapping up Nurses as well (it didn’t hurt that Global had already filmed a second season). The network gave Nurses a sweet debut spot, Dec. 7 after The Voice.

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There, it performed consistently, if not remarkably. About 3.6 million viewers tuned in for the debut, and the show closed out the season with 2.2 million. In between, it made headlines — but not in the best way. Members of the Jewish community alleged the episode Achilles Heel was anti-Semitic, and took issue with a plot in which an Orthodox Jew refused a bone graft from a potentially “Arab” or “woman” donor. There are no restrictions in Orthodox Judaism regarding transplants from cadavers, The Hollywood Reporter noted.

“In one scene, NBC has insulted and demonized religious Jews and Judaism,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. The show’s Canadian producer, eOne, swiftly issued an apology. “(We) are working to understand what transpired and ensure our research practices are exhaustive moving forward and lead only to well-informed storylines,” it said.

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Global’s owner, Corus Entertainment, removed the episode from its digital platforms and from broadcast television airings. NBC did the same. And though the U.S. network hasn’t yet announced whether it will air Nurses’ second season — after all, much of Hollywood has been back in production for months — the show still has a home in Canada.

Debuting June 21 on Global, season 2 sees the five main characters return to St. Mary’s, as well as some new faces. Nursing manager Kate Faulkner (Rachel Ancheril) joins the team, as does nurse Matteo Rey (Jordan Connor), imaging tech Candy Kemper (Katie Uhlman) and Dr. Ivy Turcotte (Humberly Gonzalez). The first season of Nurses is still available on the Global TV app.

What lies in the future for the show itself — a pandemic, a controversy and almost a year and a half after its Canadian debut? We’ll just have to wait for the prognosis.

Nurses returns for its second season June 21 on Global.

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