Ratched review: Netflix show fails with stereotypes of mental health

Netflix’s thriller about Nurse Ratched does well to remove much of the misogyny present in the book and film that created her, but it also peddles harmful stereotypes about mental health

By Bethan Ackerley

Ratched

Evan Romansky

Netflix

“SHE likes a rigged game,” says Randle McMurphy, the belligerent anti-hero of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. McMurphy is talking about his nemesis, Nurse Ratched, the sadistic overseer of a psychiatric hospital ward – and one of fiction’s most terrifying villains.

Netflix’s new TV series Ratched is a prequel to that iconic 1975 film, which was based on a 1960s novel by Ken Kesey. It promises to delve into the eponymous nurse’s psyche to explore the origins of …