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Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving.
Call the Midwife. I probably never would have watched it if my friend Rachel hadn’t sat me down in front of her TV and insisted, because when she described it my reaction was all, “Well, that sounds like it will be a morass of misery and gross medical details.”
And, to be fair, I was right: Call the Midwife is hardly free of gross medical details, and often the patients’ histories are full of ghastliness and misery. But it is also nonetheless one of the warmest, gentlest shows on television. The main characters are all people who want to help, who are trying to do good, not only for their patients but for each other.
I think there’s often an assumption that gentleness and truth, at least in fiction, are antithetical - that the only way to achieve gentleness is to ignore the vast swathes of misery in the world. But Call the Midwife shows that this isn’t true: it does look misery in the face, but rather than throwing up its hands and wallowing in the darkness, it says, “I accept that this exists and will respond to it with love and grace to try to make it better.”
Call the Midwife. I probably never would have watched it if my friend Rachel hadn’t sat me down in front of her TV and insisted, because when she described it my reaction was all, “Well, that sounds like it will be a morass of misery and gross medical details.”
And, to be fair, I was right: Call the Midwife is hardly free of gross medical details, and often the patients’ histories are full of ghastliness and misery. But it is also nonetheless one of the warmest, gentlest shows on television. The main characters are all people who want to help, who are trying to do good, not only for their patients but for each other.
I think there’s often an assumption that gentleness and truth, at least in fiction, are antithetical - that the only way to achieve gentleness is to ignore the vast swathes of misery in the world. But Call the Midwife shows that this isn’t true: it does look misery in the face, but rather than throwing up its hands and wallowing in the darkness, it says, “I accept that this exists and will respond to it with love and grace to try to make it better.”
