Call the Midwife, season 4

[osprey_archer]

I’ve been casting around for a new TV show where all or most of the episodes are directed by women. This is surprisingly hard to Google, so it took me a while to realize that I didn’t need to find a new show at all, but to go back to an old one: all of the seasons of Call the Midwife so far have had female directors for 50% or more of the episodes.

I loved the first two seasons of the show, but I felt the quality slipped in season three - and while I enjoyed season four more than season three, I think that’s because my expectations were lower, not because the quality recovered. The first two seasons were heavily based on Jennifer Worth’s memoir, Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s, which gives the cases a specificity and weirdness and bite that wholly fictional stories rarely match.

The episodes in the later seasons tend to be more generic: Call the Midwife Does Racism, or Down’s Syndrome, or Cystic Fibrosis, or Gay People.

This last one is the one that really annoyed me in season 4, for reasons that are

So in season 4, we learn that midwife Patsy is a lesbian. The narrative jumps directly from “Patsy has fish and chips with Delia the cute nurse” to “Patsy sneaks into Delia’s room to snuggle after hours,” which, okay, I feel that this is skipping over an important developmental step in their relationship, but whatever.

Things progress! Patsy and Delia get a flat together! The very morning after they rent the place, Delia rides gaily off to work! (Pun absolutely intended.) At which point she gets HIT BY A TRUCK. Which gives her TOTAL AMNESIA.

Oh come on. Come on! I can see from Wikipedia that Delia comes back in later seasons, so I guess at least this is not just their way of writing her off the show, but it still feels cheap and I dislike it.

I’m also not thrilled by Trixie’s Descent into Alcoholism. Why can’t she just be a girl who likes a good time and a drink, and drinks a completely normal amount given that it’s the 1950s and everyone drinks like a fish? Girls who have fun and don’t suffer for it! Not an overrepresented demographic on television!



So on the one hand season four is a disappointment compared to seasons one and two. Buuuut on the other hand, I’m probably going to keep watching, because there just aren’t that many shows on TV with a mainly female ensemble cast that foreground the female experience in this way… and also season 4 ends with a character cheerfully promising to recommend the new anti-nausea wonder drug thalidomide to all her friends - an ominous cliffhanger for the knowing viewer. How can I quit right when we’ve just hit thalidomide?

Comments

[asakiyume]

If you're going to have total amnesia as a plot point, I suspect a secret twin you never knew you had, kidnapping, and a prince from a not-actually-real country are waiting in the wings.

I bet there are all kinds of actual public health stuff from the fifties that they could have kept on doing--like the thalidomide plotline.

[osprey_archer]

Baffled by the amnesia. BAFFLED.

But I just watched the Christmas special following the amnesia episode, and they're already walking Delia's amnesia back. Is it medically realistic? I have no idea. Is it the only way to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves? Absolutely.

[littlerhymes]

Oh gosh, I saw so much anger from fans when the Delia plotline happened. Understandably so!!

The gold standard for female directors on tv is Ava Duvernay's Queen Sugar, which is 100% female directed (and I think a very high percentage are also women of colour). And Jessica Jones has a very high percentage as well.

[osprey_archer]

WHY DID TOTAL AMNESIA STRIKE THE SHOWRUNNERS AS A GOOD IDEA. I will never understand.

Queen Sugar is on my list! (My list has grown impossibly long. *cries quietly*) I probably should watch Jessica Jones someday but it sounds so unrelentingly dark that I probably never will.

[kore]

IIRC every episode in S2 of Jessica Jones was directed by a woman, and most of them were written by women too.

[thisbluespirit]

Pretty amusingly (as I don't think it would be relevant to your interests) for some reason, my old BBC historical series I like has 9 out of its 13 episodes directed by women, which is otherwise unheard of for the era (plus a female script editor and 1 female writer). I can't say that it actually does anything especially feminist, though, but they are far more thoughtful than 1970s BBC usually is about who gets to wear tights and shirts in the Tower, which I did appreciate.

(No idea why or how, though, but directors/producers/script-editors got passed around pretty randomly at the BBC in that period, often regardless of what they wanted to be working on, so it may have been pure chance.)

(I don't know what the numbers are on modern things I watch, because I don't tend to look usually, whereas in old TV where you have so much less opportunity for effects, music, post-editing etc., it often makes a huge difference who the director is for an episode, so I tend to watch out for the names & learn who to watch and who to avoid.)

[osprey_archer]

What series is this? It's possible that it's not even available in the US, but if it is and I run across it someday... it could be a useful thing to know.

I am now envisioning a secret feminist cabal in 1970s BBC secretly collaborating on this show, which may be inaccurate but is pretty amusing to imagine.

[thisbluespirit]

I'm sorry! I didn't mean to be quite so cryptic. It's Shadow of the Tower, about the reign of Henry VII. And, as I said, if it was a secret cabal, I don't know what their goals were apart from possibly more better looking men in tights. Which I suppose is a valid life goal if you've seen the kind of men oldtime BBC inflicts on you in tights and togas.

And women were involved at the BBC from the earliest days (in fact more in the earliest days, before they fell down a bit in the middle): https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/culture/women

I haven't been specifically looking for female directors and producers on my old TV voyages - just particular actors and series that sound interesting and are available/have actually survived, but inevitably I have come across a few. My favourites so far are Moira Armstrong, who directed my favourite episode of SotT, as well as a couple of the best of Adam Adamant Lives!, (and if you ever do go down this road, I haven't seen it, but she also worked on the BAFTA winning 1979 mini series of Testament of Youth), and Mary Ridge, who directed pretty much all of the most powerful and atmospheric Blake's 7 episodes, including "Blake" (the (in)famous final episode).

In the making of a TV series, the key people for the creative direction were the Producer/Script editor team. Significant female producers I'm aware of include obviously Verity Lambert (first producer of Doctor Who, as well as Adam Aadmant Lives! and later had her own production company, which made Jonathan Creek) and Irene Shubik, who was very influential, working on some of the most prestigious play anthology series, including the SF Out of the Unknown, (both brought to the BBC by Sydney Newman) and Stella Richman at ITV, who haven't seen much of her work yet but she had an impressive career, and cast James Maxwell in a 1964 series called The Hidden Truth, an early show about forensics with a notably multicultural cast (burninated, of course) but she also saw the potential in JM to play different, more villainous parts and cast him in a play afterwards, which put his career on another level, hence me knowing about her!

Under the producer, though, the director had very significant powers over each individual episode - they cast them, worked with the rest of the production team, and also rehearsed for 1-3 weeks beforehand with the actors (time given depending usually on length of the episode; generally 2 weeks for 50 minutes, and 2 days in studio), plus any pre-production filmwork. Female dierctors I've come across are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Capon (directed half of the BBC's Six Wives of Henry VIII)

From DW (and thus also BBC; ITV is not doing well in these stakes, but maybe Sydney Newman took almost all the women with him from over there to the Beeb when he moved):

Sarah Hellings: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0375451/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Cumming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Russell

And there's Prudence Fitzgerald, who directed the most eps on SotT and also produced several series. I haven't seen her other stuff yet, so it's hard to comment - in SotT she seems to be very experimental. (CSO, vaseline on the lens, no set at all, dream sequences in my BBC historical? More likely than you'd think. :lol:)

I'm sure that is more than you ever wanted to know, but should you ever decide to add Women Who Struggled in Cardboard Telly to your watchlist and want episode recs or links, or just warnings of what to avoid (Ben Steed!!) I am your woman. Just ask. It's always nice to feel these last few years weren't completely wasted!