'Call the Midwife' Answers Demands for Simplicity, Morality

The BBC period drama Call the Midwife was ranked as the best show of the past 25 years — beating other popular TV productions, including Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones —  to claim the top prize in last year's Radio Times poll.

The series spans from the late 1950s through the 1960s and is originally inspired by the real-life memoirs written by Jennifer Worth.

The show centers on a group of nurse midwives and nuns living and working together in the poor East End London town of Poplar. With the Nonnatus House sisters, nurses and the town’s doctor, Patrick Turner, remaining a steady presence throughout the seasons, each episode introduces a new set of women tackling many of the same complications facing today's society.

Call the Midwife captures the evolving attitudes towards topics such as divorce, abortion and race relations. Viewers are given a glimpse into drifts in time through cultural touchstones marked by changes to rock 'n' roll music and alterations denoting higher hemlines.

The show's success lies in the depth of characters within Nonnatus, whose combination of grace, empathy and grit is rooted to a time in which commitments to community superseded particularist pleasures.

Though the seasonal plots may differ, viewers of the television hit are suspended in an era decades before the emergence of social media, when the elderly were seldom considered burdens, men arrived in a jacket and tie when picking up a date, and social constructs dictated a degree of refinement in both appearance and dialogue.

With piercing accuracy, the series telegraphs the distinctions between the conventional tenor anchoring Poplar's community and the traditions diminishing in a society where upholding standards for civilized discourse and respect for country are receding values to a rising generation consumed with online portals and individual gratification.

In a conversation earlier this year with American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Naomi Schaefer Riley, Civics Educator Jack Miller phrased his concerns for our nation's future by accurately stating, "I'm not afraid of the country we're leaving our kids, I'm afraid of the kids we're leaving our country."

Indeed, Miller's fear struck a new chord after Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America, in which the terrorist attempted to justify the al-Qaeda attacks that killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, went viral last month on the Chinese-owned app TikTok. As terrorist sympathizers took to the streets to protest Israel, the fanatical fallacies contained in the essay, first published in 2002, reached millions of young online users.

Precipitated by an absence of civics education and exacerbated by social media's role in fostering fabrications, Bin Laden's falsehoods were granted worrying degrees of legitimacy.

America's new breed of activists are ill-equipped to delineate the basic tenets of American history, let alone what they're protesting against. Last year's U.S. History and Civics assessment scores witnessed only 13% of eighth grade students scoring at or above proficiency in history and 22% attaining proficiency in civics.

At the same time, a recent poll cited in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month confirmed that, in one group, 60% of students walked back their support for the slogan "from the river to the sea" after learning that the definition of the phrase is wedded to the eradication of Israel.

The behavioral patterns under which our nation's youth are seduced by empty slogans and damaging lingo underscores the implications of a weakening moral fabric. The popularity of period dramas like Call the Midwife is embedded in the characters' ability to transport viewers back to a time when meaningful interaction and human engagement were rooted in the ethos of everyday citizens.

For example, each season is punctuated by moving episodes devoted to the significance of Christmas, with scenes and story lines often centering on Dr. Turner gathering his family along with the people of Poplar to mark the day's festivities.

Associating the town's appraise of tolerance and kindness through casting attention on religious fidelity stands in sharp contrast to developments last month, when the annual New York City Rockefeller tree lighting ceremony was disrupted by pro-Hamas protestors.

Tourists visiting the city to catch sight of the commemoration were greeted by violent cohorts of shrieking demonstrators whose attachments to vandalism denigrated what was designed to be a meaningful event for American families.

While the hordes of youth who harbor such penchants for destruction are not confined to college campuses or city streets, their actions are symbolic of a movement that has found more fulfillment scrolling through the lives of others than creating memories of their own.

The decaying emphasis placed on civic and religious obligations, coupled with the spike in time spent online, is contributing to collapsing social guardrails inherent to the prosperity of western civilization.

With that said, many issues arising throughout the 12 seasons of Call the Midwife are not specific to the show’s era or geographic location. On the contrary, the mosaic of challenges involving broken marriages, drug abuse, and racism continue to present themselves today.

The difference lies not in the weight of the problems but in the substance of the cast, whose capacity for human interaction and empathy renders them engaged and thoughtful contributors to the communities in which they live.

These qualities continue to be warmly regarded by millions of Americans, whose craving for simplicity and moral clarity will surely have them tuning into Call the Midwife when the series returns for season 13 in March.