Call the Midwives..

In the April 24 episode of the BBC series “Call the Midwife,” which just ended an especially strong fifth season on PBS, a nun (played by the wonderful Jenny Agutter) witnesses the birth of a severely deformed baby. Later, searching for the infant at the request of its anxious mother, the nun finds it abandoned, still breathing, in a hospital laundry room. Someone has placed the newborn in front of an opened window. Watching that scene, what snaps your head back is not the horror of its subject but the matter-of-factness of its execution. Like most of this show’s unfailingly humane explorations of life in a poor dockside neighborhood of London in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the mercy killing of a child suffering the appalling side effects of the morning-sickness drug thalidomide is handled with quiet compassion and without judgment. This generosity of spirit and unwillingness to condemn are the most endearing traits of “Call the Midwife,” based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, a nurse who sadly died before the first episode was broadcast. Set at a time when homosexuality and abortion were illegal and the National Health Service was still finding its feet, the series weaves questions of identity, agency and survival into episodes that, without fuss or fanfare, confront the show’s staunch midwives with problems like incest, chemical castration, syphilis and sex slavery. Yet the darkness of the story lines never slows the brisk pacing or dulls the cheering warmth of the photography. Otherwise, some scenes would be almost unbearable to watch. As it is, the show is rarely less than touching and often — like the Season 5 finale, which brings the death of a major character — quite devastating. (It also features the most realistic newborns on television, where babies usually arrive looking weirdly alien or, worse, virtually ready for preschool.) Mingling the spiritual and the secular with a deftness that might be unique on television, the stories address moral challenges like prostitution and the contraceptive pill with bracing pragmatism. Sudden swerves into melodrama, like a recent subplot about a nun’s beating at the hands of a rogue Russian sailor, are short-lived; the quotidian challenges of the poor and pregnant are enough to guarantee a swift return to narrative equilibrium. ...

Photo credit New York times.