Comfort viewing can be uncomfortable

Watching reruns of ER, I realised that nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

The trend for nostalgia TV on the streaming services is both comforting and confronting. Reruns of laugh-out-loud telly – Absolutely Fabulous, Friends, Father Ted – that bring me back to the skanky flat I lived in while I was in college.

I encourage my teenage children to watch with me – “You’ll love this! It’s hilarious! Wait till you see what happens when Eddie and Pats go to France!” I start laughing before the opening credits have finished. The teens roll their eyes and go back to their 15-second videos of cats in tracksuits.

And yet, as the grainy images of the clunky sets roll into my view, I suddenly start squirming in my seat. I find myself cringing at the blatant racist comments. I recoil at the constant objectification of women. I shudder at the derogatory language being used.

I recoil at the constant objectification of women

Was this really what we were being fed, just 20 or 30 years ago?

I saw that every episode of ER was up on Netflix. Fantastic, I thought, I loved that show. So much better than soppy Grey’s Anatomy. Proper medicine.

I noticed that it was first aired in 1994, the very same year I found myself in First Med in UCC. It made perfect sense to me at the time that watching an hour of Drs Ross and Greene was equivalent to at least three hours of studying in the library. I was learning about the humanity of medicine, the cut and thrust of life, death, and team dynamics.

So I settled down in my fleecy pyjamas and tucked into a nostalgia fest.

Only it didn’t quite go according to plan.

Why did every woman who appeared on the screen receive a full behind-her-back commentary on her appearance? Why did Dr Ross make almost all females weak at the knees, fluttering their eyelashes at him, even as he fell around his own workplace drunk as a rat? Why are the black nurses portrayed as stern, while the white nurses are the swoony-Clooney ones?

In one scene, played for laughs, a policeman describes how he shot himself in the leg while arguing with his wife. He lauds himself for his restraint for not actually shooting her (“I wanted to belt her right in the mouth, I really did,” said the cop. “These things happen,” replied the bumbling medical student).  

It got worse. The 13-year-old with an ectopic pregnancy, being scorned by the two doctors for not admitting she had sex, with no reference whatsoever that what had happened to her was rape.

The competent nurse who was wheeled in after attempting suicide, with the undercurrent that her distress was due to unrequited love.

The glamorous strident mom who was so focused on her fancy career that she neglected and battered her baby.

The college student who purposely burned her own upper thighs so that a handsome doctor (male) would have to rub cream on them.

The crazy old rich lady who visits the ER weekly, also to swoon under the strong firm hands of the handsome male doctors.

It just went on and on and on.

The feisty female medical student who will no doubt be described as a “ball-breaker” in episode two and will of course succumb to the Clooney Swoon eventually.

Sometimes nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We all know that the Good Old Days had their problems, but we cannot help ourselves from exaggerating the positives and blithely ignoring the negatives. People say this is the only reason that women have more than one child – if you were to actually weigh up the pros and cons of pregnancy and delivery with a clear retrospective analysis, it would be unlikely that any woman would give it a second shot.

But there is no doubt that there is comfort to be gained by reliving our past, with the rose-tinted glasses firmly in place.

Thank God for The Muppets revival. Miss Piggy and Sabrina Carpenter gave me proper belly laughs, while Statler and Waldorf made sure no one took any of it too seriously.