Skip to main content

BuzzFeed: "7 Reasons Call The Midwife Is One Of The Best Shows On Television"

Besides the number of times this period drama makes you sob like a baby.

At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "7 Reasons Call The Midwife Is One Of The Best Shows On Television," in which I extol the virtues of Call the Midwife, which returns for its third season on Sunday, March 30.

The third season of BBC’s Call the Midwife — which wrapped up last month in the U.K. and begins on March 30 on PBS in the States — attracted an audience of more than 10 million viewers when it aired across the Atlantic, a figure that puts it on nearly equal footing with Downton Abbey. But that series gets far more attention than this subtle and superb period drama.

Set in 1950s East End London and based on Jennifer Worth’s memoirs, Call the Midwife tracks the lives of a group of young midwives and the sisterhood of nuns with whom they work at Nonnatus House. Babies are born, labors — both real and figurative — undertaken, and love blossoms and fades. It is an extraordinary show about birth and death and what comes in between. As written by Heidi Thomas and her talented staff, Call the Midwife manages to be both warm and profound in equal measure, opening a window to a time long gone yet offering a glimpse into the eternal and the transitory. It’s tea cozy television with a very deep soul.

But if you haven’t yet watched Call the Midwife (or have already fallen in love with its easy charms), here are seven reasons why it is worth watching. (Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)

Continue reading at BuzzFeed...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Have a Burning Question for Team Darlton, Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, or Michael Emerson?

Lost fans: you don't have to make your way to the island via Ajira Airways in order to ask a question of the creative team or the series' stars. Televisionary is taking questions from fans to put to Lost 's executive producers/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and stars Matthew Fox ("Jack Shephard"), Evangeline Lilly ("Kate Austen"), and Michael Emerson ("Benjamin Linus") for a series of on-camera interviews taking place this weekend. If you have a specific question for any of the above producers or actors from Lost , please leave it in the comments section below . I'll be accepting questions until midnight PT tonight and, while I can't promise I'll be able to ask any specific inquiry due to the brevity of these on-camera interviews, I am looking for some insightful and thought-provoking questions to add to the mix. So who knows: your burning question might get asked after all.

What's Done is Done: The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil on the Season Finale of "Lost"

Every story begins with thread. It's up to the storyteller to determine just how much they need to parcel out, what pattern they're making, and when to cut it short and tie it off. With last night's penultimate season finale of Lost ("The Incident, Parts One and Two"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, we began to see the pattern that Lindelof and Cuse have been designing towards the last five seasons of this serpentine series. And it was only fitting that the two-hour finale, which pushes us on the road to the final season of Lost , should begin with thread, a loom, and a tapestry. Would Jack follow through on his plan to detonate the island and therefore reset their lives aboard Oceanic Flight 815 ? Why did Locke want to kill Jacob? What caused The Incident? What was in the box and just what lies in the shadow of the statue? We got the answers to these in a two-hour season finale that didn't quite pack the same emotional wallop of previous season ...

In Defense of Downton Abbey (Or, Don't Believe Everything You Read)

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Which means, if I can get on my soapbox for a minute, that in order to judge something, one ought to experience it first hand. One can't know how the pudding has turned out until one actually tastes it. I was asked last week--while I was on vacation with my wife--for an interview by a journalist from The Daily Mail, who got in touch to talk to me about PBS' upcoming launch of ITV's period drama Downton Abbey , which stars Hugh Bonneville, Dame Maggie Smith, Dan Stevens, Elizabeth McGovern, and a host of others. (It launches on Sunday evening as part of PBS' Masterpiece Classic ; my advance review of the first season can be read here , while my interview with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes and stars Dan Stevens and Hugh Bonneville can be read here .) Normally, I would have refused, just based on the fact that I was traveling and wasn't working, but I love Downton Abbey and am so enchanted with the proj...