Julián Trujillo and Miguel González as Álvaro and Felipe
If you're a Nurses fan you'll Know. Season 4 was suddenly pulled from Telemundo last week, replaced with a re-re-yawn of Decisions without any explanation from the channel or NBCUniversal.
What's going on and where is it?
According to entertainment blogger and TVSA member
Insidus it was taken off-air because of the homosexual content on the show, which also broadcasts in countries where homosexuality is illegal e.g. Ugaynda.
Telemundo's DStv broadcast feed is the same throughout Africa, meaning laws that apply in one country impact on another as everyone sees the same series.
Nurses disappeared off TV within a month of Ugaynda passing the draconian, tyrannical Anti Homosexuality Act that calls for life imprisonment for anyone "convicted" of engaging in a sexual act with someone of the same sex and the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality".
Also, the promotion or normalisation of homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment for up to 20 years and fines.
Here's a link to it:
Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act
This during Pride Month 2023.
Just after
this threat by Cameroon's media regulator, titled Warning:
The CNC calls on the promoters of channels broadcasting programs showing scenes of homosexuality in Cameroon to immediately withdraw these programs, which violate the law, morality and customs of our country, on pain of the outright suspension of the media concerned.
These events
must be why the show is gone.
We asked Telemundo why Nurses is off-air and if it's because of this. They haven't gone into details, so as not to get cancelled we presume, but reading between the lines it is. Their statement:
We intend to comply with local broadcast regulations in each market where we broadcast and are adjusting the programming as necessary.
It's clearly a sudden and unexpected turn of events for the network as the channel's July highlights were released before this happened and Nurses was included as per usual.
One feed, different laws, one big problemo.
If you need your Nurses fix you'll see that it's available in South Africa on Universal TV+ on DStv Now. We're only seeing up until Episode 34 though and there should be over 40 episodes loaded so far so it looks like there's a snafu with that too.
The moral of the story: NEVER take our South African freedoms for granted.