One of the things I most appreciate about Call the Midwife is its character writing. There are plenty of shows that suffer from flanderization or character derailment in an effort to keep things interesting, but Call the Midwife is and remains to be an excellent, character-driven drama over six-plus seasons (As an American, I’m a little behind on the most recent episodes).
Speaking as someone who knows nothing about writing for a television series, I can only imagine how difficult it is to maintain quality writing when you have little to no control what the future holds. The series might get cancelled. Actors and actresses might pursue other roles. The audience might not respond well to a storyline necessitating the show to go a different direction. There are so many things about syndication that our outside the writer’s control, but they still have the thankless job of working around all the bumps and hiccups to produce the story they want to tell.
I eventually want to focus on how the show handled the character of Sister Evangelina, but before we get there I want to explore a little of what I think makes the writing as engaging as it is, using some of the other characters. With that in mind, let’s begin.
Also, beware of major spoilers, especially for season five. If any of my followers haven’t watched Call the Midwife it’s on Netflix and is awesome. Go watch it and then come back. I’ll still be here.
Episodes, Seasons, and Series: The Basic Units of Television
When evaluating the writing for a television series, I like to break the show down into three units of measure: The episode, the season, and the series as a whole. There can be good episodes in bad seasons, or bad seasons in otherwise good shows, or any combination of the above.
Call the Midwife maintains a strong continuity, and because each season is less than ten episodes it doesn’t have a lot of time to mess around with filler material that doesn’t somehow advance the plot. The hour runtime of most episodes (extended to an hour and half for the Christmas specials) gives the series time to develop an interesting and compelling case of the week-style medical drama while also allowing for a large ensemble cast, which after the departure of Jenny Lee in the third season doesn’t have a main character but rather rotates through the stories of the nuns and midwives of Nonnatus House.
While I would argue that each season has its own main theme, the overarching concept the series is trying to explore is love. There are narrated voice overs at the beginning and end of each episode that drive this point home, which can come off as narmy or charmingly sweet depending on your disposition. Romantic love, familial love, love for community...all these things are the thread that bind the series into its current form.
But it’s through these themes of love that Call the Midwife explores heavy issues such as poverty, women’s rights, health, mental health, alcoholism, abuse, racism, homosexuality, death, and so much more. It also is a period piece examining life in the late 1950s to early 60s though a modern lens, both optimistic at how far we’ve come and exploring how much farther we have to go.
To say Call the Midwife is ambitious is an understatement, and with a series that has so much to say might forget that it’s first and foremost a story, but it doesn’t. The characters act like real people, with real struggles, hopes, dreams and ambitions. The medical aspects of the show are well-researched and realistically displayed. While maintaining an overall optimistic tone it doesn’t shy away from the difficult or unpleasant realities of life.
This kind of balance can only be maintained with good character writing. The characters are the backbone of the show, and everything else branches off from their experiences.
(It should also be noted that the series has some excellent actors and actresses that bring this writing to life, but I’m going to basically ignore that aspect of things because I know less about acting than I do writing.)
Let’s look at the example of Season One, Episode One. The series opens with newly-qualified midwife Jenny Lee walking through the East End of London towards her new job, while the narrator (an older Jenny) says the following:
I must have been mad! I could have been an air hostess, I could have been a model, I could have moved to Paris or been a concert pianist. I could have seen the world, been brave, followed my heart. But I didn't. I side-stepped love and set off for the east-end of London because I thought it would be easier. Madness is the only explanation!
Another side note: Call the Midwife was drawing from the memoir of Jennifer Worth at this point in time, so I’m not 100% sure if this is a direct quotation or not, but I’m pretty sure it’s original material.
In any case, Jenny walks past a scene of two women fighting: A heavily pregnant wife going after her husband’s mistress. There’s a circle of onlookers egging them on, while Jenny watches helplessly until the police and Sister Evangelina arrive and break up the altercation.
Jenny eventually reaches Nonnatus House, meets the delightfully senile Sister Monica Joan, and admits to Sister Julienne that she thought she was working at a small private hospital when in fact she will be living and working in a convent.
This one small scene--over and done with in the first ten minutes of the episode--tells you everything you need to know about Jenny as well as the main theme of the season.
I’ve alternately thought of the first season of Call the Midwife as being about finding your place in the world, growing up, and overcoming naivete. Jenny--and later on Chummy who also happens to get a lot of screen time--are both new midwives and know nothing about living in poverty, neither are terribly experienced with love, and in Jenny’s case is holding onto the idea of a relationship she knows she can’t have rather than accepting what will make her happy.
This theme not the focus of every episode and the series doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but there’s no denying it’s there. In Episode 2, Chummy has to learn to ride a bicycle and overcome her poor self-esteem to deliver a breech baby. In Episode 3, Jenny finds herself looking after a kindly old man named Joe and has to deal with overcoming her own revulsion of his deplorable living conditions to care for him as a person. Episode 5 has Jenny coming face to face with the horrors of the workhouse and the long-acting consequences it has on those who lived in them.
Each episode contains its own self-contained story and themes that bolster that of the series--Jenny learns to see her poverty-stricken patients as “heroines”, Chummy delivers the breech baby and gains the respect of her peers, etc.--that are in and of themselves interesting. Anyone can jump into just about any episode of Call the Midwife and understand the jist of what’s going on, and still have the pleasure of seeing a unique spin on the medical drama format.
The true genius is how the writers have taken seeds planted early in the series and let them develop organically into plot twists that don’t seem like asspulls. For example, when I introduced the Call the Midwife to my roommates we made it to maybe the second season when one of them remarked “Wow, Trixie sure drinks a lot.” And it’s true. Trixie has always been the fun-loving girl who, though extremely skilled, is always looking for a good time. It makes complete sense that given the stresses in her personal and professional life she would develop into a functioning (and later on not so functioning) alcoholic.
But when you look back on these early seasons Trixie’s drinking habit isn’t really mentioned. It’s just...sort of there, and an accepted part of her characterization without being commented on until much later in the series. The show never goes out of the way to emphasize Trixie’s drinking until it starts interfering with her life, which makes it feel both like a natural consequence and an unexpected plot-point at the same time.
You can have this natural growth only by treating the characters as characters, and not glorified mouth-pieces that for the soap-box special of the day. Going back to the example of Trixie, we get to learn eventually that a large part of her bubbly personality is a front, see her struggle to be taken seriously as a midwife and a woman, fight through a relationship with a good but ultimately incompatible fiancee, and mature into a better person and health-care provider because of it all. It’s a testament to the quality of the writing when during the Season 6 Christmas special set in South Africa that I 100% believed that Trixie could and would be able to preform a C-section without a doctor present and that her coworkers would trust her enough to pull it off.
(I kind of hope Trixie becomes the 1960s English version of a nurse practitioner, but that’s beside the point).
There are seeds like this sprinkled all throughout the series: Sister Bernadette wistfully letting her hair down after the non-nun midwives go out dancing, Cynthia Miller’s tendency towards depression and anxiety after the death of the Kelly baby, Jenny showing an interest in end of life care multiple times before her departure of the series, the list goes on and on.
Which brings me back to Sister Evangelina.
Tying Together Character and Theme
As previously stated, Season One of Call the Midwife is a classic fish out of water scenario, and if you’re going to take a fish out of water it stands to reason that you’re going to have someone who wants to see them flounder.
That person is Sister Evangelina.
Now I’m not saying that Sister Evangelina isn’t a good character, but out of the main cast she’s one of the ones who gets the least development. Her main duty in the show is to give voice to other character’s insecurities and act as a sort of antagonist that they have to overcome. She’s the most staunchly traditional character in a series pioneering modern liberal idealism who’s most definable character traits are her sharp tongue and unyielding nature. Some quotes include:
“The East End will eat her for breakfast”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is. You young girls do too much book-learning. You sit for months in classrooms, filling your heads with loads of codswallop, when simple practical tasks are beyond you!”
“She may be my sister in Christ but I swear, she would drive a Methodist to drink!”
“If you’re suggesting that a few deep breaths and not thinking about what’s for dinner is all there is to labor, you’re leading your patients up the fairy way”
Sister Evangelina cares, but she is not by nature kind. She’s an action first, my way or the highway, suspicious of newcomers because they don’t know what they’re doing kind of character. She fits perfectly as an obstacle for the younger generation of midwives to overcome and a voice against new-fangled nonsense such such as gas and air for pain relief during deliveries, and updating to a freaking Rolodex.
Yes, even a Rolodex is reasonable cause for a fight with Sister Evangelina.
And that’s not to say that she’s an evil or nasty woman, just a hard one, born and shaped by a life filled with hardness to the point that’s all she really knows. We understand where she’s come from and why she thinks the way she does, but at the same time by the time Season Five rolls around the series has outgrown her.
One of the major themes for Season Five is change: change in how medicine is practiced, change from an the old generation to the new, and irreversible changes in society as it marches forward. The young, inexperienced midwives aren’t so young and inexperienced, and the introduction of Nurse Crane has taken Sister Evangelina’s status as the “tough but fair” one while being a more relatable and progressive character overall, thus fitting better with the evolution of the series and where it wants to go.
At the same time, Sister Evangelina was relatively beloved by the fandom, and a complex and deserving character in her own right. When Pam Ferris decided to leave the series, how were the writers going to let her go with grace and dignity, as befitting of her status in- and out of universe?
By killing her off in the best way possible.
Early in Season Five Sister Evangelina is confronted with the fact that her dismissive attitude towards formula versus breast milk has caused serious harm to a mother and baby. She’s rightfully called out by Barbra Gilbert, one of the newer nurses (this is important, remember the theme of the changing of the guard) before going off to the Mother House for some serious self-reflection.
She comes back much later after it’s revealed she’s had a stroke. Sister Evangelina, a woman who believes she best serves God through direct action, is rendered unable to do just that. While able to do some nursing cares one-handed, she gives up handling babies because she might, you know, drop them, returning to her rightful place at Nonnatus House a humbled woman.
This would have been good enough, but the show takes the time to give her a renewed purpose before killing her off. I think it’s important that she spends her last delivery with Barbra, imparting her knowledge and unique brand of home-spun wisdom to the very person who drove her into exile. Her journey comes full circle when she picks up a baby for the final time, shouts a bit for old time’s sake, and dies peacefully in her sleep with her character arc completed. The tear-inducing funeral montage is just extra icing on the cake, giving the audience a greater appreciation for her impact on the community she served for so many years.
I’m not going to say that every single plot thread is handled with such deftness, and some characters pop into and out of the series with more grace than others. But when you treat your characters as characters, and let them grow, and change, and suffer, and overcome organically then you don’t have to throw screwy plot twists or derail a character to stay “relevant”. If you can’t trust your characters to be interesting without major outside intervention, then maybe you just need better characters.
It’s difficult, but it can be done. I know, because I and many others have been invested for over six seasons now, and I think I can speak for the fandom on this one and say that we don’t plan on stopping any time soon.
