“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” said Michael Hogan in The Telegraph. The “East-End childbirth saga” is now 15 seasons old, and has become “a TV lynchpin”.
Beneath its “cosy exterior”, “Call the Midwife” remains “one of the most radical, rousing shows” on television. Expertly blending the “personal and political” into a kind of “historical soap opera”, it’s both “hard-hitting and heartfelt in equal measure”.
We return to the Nonnatus House team in 1971, as the women’s liberation movement gathers pace in London’s Poplar. While the younger midwives are “enthusiastically” burning their bras and joining protests, the older generation “take some convincing”.
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The expression on Nurse Crane’s face as she listens to her young colleagues talk of “whipping off” their “Playtex Cross Your Heart” is “a picture”, said Carol Midgley in The Times, and there’s a fascinating scene where she discusses Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” with her friend Millicent. “Ooh, in ‘Call the Midwife’! Who’d have thought it?”
What a “corker” the opening episode is. It moves “seamlessly” from “dry wit to darkest misery and back again”, reminding us how “deceptively uncosy” the show can be. It “never sugar-coats” the serious stuff. Among the “heart-rending” subplots is the story of “poverty-stricken” children facing parental abuse and neglect, and a young pregnant woman battling extreme morning sickness, who gives birth at 28 weeks.
Newly qualified midwife Sister Catherine (Molly Vevers) “struggles with the consequences” of such a devastatingly premature delivery for the mother and herself, said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. I’m always “impressed” at how the show “swerves the saccharine in favour of the uncertainties of life as it is lived by all of us”.
By now, “Call the Midwife” should come with “some kind of emotional warning” that “side effects will include uncontrollable weeping”, said Janet A. Leigh on Digital Spy. After so many seasons, it’s a testament to the show that it still “holds the power to make us cry”.
This is definitely a “return to form” after the “middling” Christmas specials, said Hogan in The Telegraph. “Call the Midwife” is “superior comfort viewing” with an excellent female-led cast. Even in its 15th series, it can “still delight and surprise.”
