Call the Midwife

Created by Heidi Thomas and adapted from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife begins in 1957 with a young nurse arriving in London's impoverished East End to work alongside the nursing nuns of Nonnatus House — a religious order modelled on the real Community of St John the Divine. What she expects is a private hospital; what she finds is tenements, dockers' families, outdoor privies and a district where babies are still born on kitchen tables. The series premiered on BBC One on 15 January 2012 with six episodes and has run for fifteen series, with Vanessa Redgrave supplying the retrospective narration of an older Jenny looking back on the world she entered.

Across its run the show functions less as a serial than as a moving chronicle. Each episode braids two or three patient stories around the permanent household of Nonnatus House: nuns, secular nurses, a local GP's surgery, a handyman and his family. The medicine advances season by season — from home births by candlelight to the arrival of gas and air, the maternity home, the contraceptive pill, vaccination programmes and the growing authority of the National Health Service — and with it the social landscape, which moves from post-war austerity through Caribbean and South Asian migration, slum clearance, the 1967 Abortion Act era and, in the fifteenth series, the women's liberation movement of 1971.

What holds it together is repetition rather than twist: the bicycles, the black bags, the boiled instruments, the same rooms revisited by different griefs. Characters arrive, are formed by Poplar, and leave; the House absorbs each loss and carries on. It is a series about continuity of care in the most literal sense — a story told through the recurring, unglamorous labour of women looking after other women, one delivery at a time.

The series argues that the most consequential history is not made in parliaments but in back bedrooms — that a society should be judged by how it treats a woman in labour and the child she delivers into poverty. Its central claim is that care is a political act: the nuns' vocation and the nurses' professionalism are shown to be the practical, unromantic mechanism by which dignity is distributed to people the wider world has written off.

Its second claim is about memory. Narrated throughout from the vantage of an older woman looking back, the show frames the vanished East End not as quaint but as a place whose suffering was real and whose remedies — the NHS, sanitation, contraception, vaccination, legal abortion — were fought for rather than granted. By staging each medical and legislative advance through one family's story, the series insists that progress is neither inevitable nor abstract; it is measured in individual bodies spared.

Finally, it is a sustained argument against the idea that gentleness is naive. The show's famous warmth is deliberately paired with harrowing material — stillbirth, incest, backstreet abortion, thalidomide, racism, illness that kills the beloved — so that its consolations must be earned. Love, in this series, is not a feeling but a rota, a bicycle in the rain, and someone who turns up.

Comfort drama versus social realism. The most persistent critical split concerns what the show actually is. One reading treats it as the definitive 'cosy' watch — a reassuring ritual of bicycles, hymns and happy endings, the reason it thrives as a binge-watch. The opposing reading holds that the cosiness is a delivery mechanism: the warm surface is precisely what allows the series to smuggle stillbirth, illegal abortion and racism into a family slot. The production itself has leaned into the second view, describing series 15 as 'not a cosy watch' and a deliberate change of energy.

Call the Midwife arrived on BBC One in January 2012 into a British television landscape dominated by upstairs-downstairs period nostalgia, and immediately redefined what a Sunday-night costume drama could be about. By taking working-class women's reproductive lives as its central subject — rather than aristocratic romance — it opened the genre to material television had largely avoided: stillbirth, backstreet abortion, incest, illegitimacy, disability, the thalidomide scandal, and the daily arithmetic of poverty. Its success made a decade-long fixture of the slot and demonstrated that mass, family-audience drama could carry explicitly feminist and pro-welfare-state content.

Its second major cultural function has been as a popular history of the National Health Service. Because each series is pegged to a specific year, the show has dramatised in sequence the arrival of gas and air, mass vaccination, the contraceptive pill, changing abortion law, and the integration of Caribbean and South Asian migrants into British nursing — making it, for many viewers, the primary popular narrative of how mid-century Britain built its health system. It has also been credited with raising public awareness of conditions and events (thalidomide's long-term effects among them) that had faded from general memory, and the fifteenth series, set in 1971, brings the chronicle up to the Women's Liberation Movement itself.

Critically and commercially it has been a durable success — an 8.6 IMDb score and a 95% Rotten Tomatoes audience score reflect an unusually stable reputation across fifteen years — and it became a substantial international property, most prominently through PBS in the United States, where it developed a devoted following and extensive companion coverage. It has generated a real-world tourism industry: the official location tour at The Historic Dockyard Chatham, created with Neal Street Productions, is the only one of its kind. Its legacy is a template widely imitated but rarely matched: the anthology-of-patients structure, the retrospective female narrator, and the insistence that gentleness and social anger can occupy the same hour of television.

The series has enjoyed remarkably stable affection across its entire run, reflected in an 8.6 IMDb score and a 95% Rotten Tomatoes audience score — figures that have held despite a cast turnover that would have destabilised most long-running dramas. Audiences have consistently praised the writing, the performances, and the historical and medical accuracy, and the constancy of Jenny Agutter, Judy Parfitt, Helen George and Laura Main across all fifteen seasons is frequently cited as the anchor that made departures survivable.

Reception by era follows a recognisable pattern. The early seasons were embraced for their freshness and for Vanessa Redgrave's narration, with the loss of Jenny as an on-screen presence prompting the first widespread fears that the show could not continue; it did, and the concern faded. The middle seasons are generally regarded as the show's dramatic peak and also its most punishing: Sister Evangelina's death in the series-five finale and Barbara's death from meningococcal septicaemia in series 7 are the two moments audiences most often single out, the latter routinely described as the single saddest episode of the entire series. Chummy's exit in the 2014 Christmas special remains a lingering regret for many viewers, particularly once it became clear the absence was down to scheduling rather than story.

The main lines of criticism are consistent. Some viewers find the formula repetitive — two patient stories, a crisis, a redemptive voiceover — and complain of emotional manipulation, arguing the show reaches too reliably for tears. Others object to the reverse: that the material has grown too bleak for a Sunday evening, with successive seasons stacking bereavement on bereavement. A third strand of debate concerns the show's issue-of-the-week approach to social history, which some read as admirably educational and others as didactic. The series' handling of abortion, contraception and disability has periodically drawn complaint from viewers who consider it inappropriate for a family slot, and equal praise from those who consider that exactly its value.

Verdict: a rare case of a long-runner that neither collapsed nor coasted. Its reputation as the ultimate comfort binge coexists with a track record of some of the most upsetting hours on British television, and the fifteenth and reportedly final season — set in 1971 and previewed as darker and less cosy — has been received as an appropriately unsentimental conclusion rather than a victory lap.