but would be interested to hear what you think of it.
I think I'd sum it up as being one of my better guilty pleasures.
(Full disclosure: by a strange combination of circumstances, I was born only a few miles and years from where the series is set.)
Call The Midwife, like
Mad Men in the US is one of those stealth history lessons of the near-recent past. In between the melodrama and the nuns on bicycles, it manages to serve up a stark reminder of quite how much our world has changed in just a few decades.
Like many British TV shows, it benefits from a wealth of character actors who,
apart from the dentistry, seem utterly believable as denizens of late 1950s Poplar.
Like the Showtime series
The Knick, its also a reminder of how much medical technology has changed. If nothing else, watching the friendly GP puffing away on a cigarette in his surgery is a little jarring.
In all honesty, I felt that
Call The MidWife lost a little creative and emotional steam by the middle of series Three. The most emotional, and IMHO best, episodes came in the first two series. That said, having lost the central character (Jenny Lee, played by Jessica Raine) the series may be able to refocus and regain some of its charm.
Its definitely a good show, one that is almost by definition feminist in its portrayal of strong, capable, and courageous women. That it manages to do this without becoming hectoring or overly judgmental is quite an achievement. The stories don't always have happy endings.
The only real criticism I'd have of the show is the soundtrack. Sometimes I think they just jam in a late 1950s classic - Dean Martin's
Volare or Doris Day's
Que Sera Sera because they could. The songs don't seem to "mesh" into the storyline with quite the same artistry that
Mad Men's producers manage to pull off. And - like a certain other well-loved British period drama, the soundtrack seems overly reliant on plangent plucked strings to punctuate plot points.
