Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Call the Midwife: Season Three Blu-ray Movie Review

End of an Era

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 15, 2014

Spoiler alert: This review assumes that the reader is familiar with the first two seasons of Call the Midwife. Readers new to the series should consult the review of Season One for a spoiler-free introduction.

The second season of Call the Midwife proved to be so popular that it overtook Downton Abbey in U.K. ratings, and the show's appeal wasn't limited to Britain. By February 2013, BBC Worldwide announced that Call the Midwife had been sold to an impressive 100 overseas territories (a number that has since doubled). A third season was inevitable, even though the creative team had already exhausted the stories recounted in the bestselling memoirs of former midwife Jennifer Worth, the inspiration and nominal star of the series, as portrayed by Jessica Raine. Fortunately, series creator Heidi Thomas had the prescience to secure Worth's permission to create new storylines from independent sources, and there was no shortage of material, as the success of Worth's memoirs and the TV adaptation had inspired other former midwives to share their experiences.

The creative team also had the benefit of vividly realized characters to whom the public had become deeply attached and for whom they could now invent original plots. Season Two initiated one such development with the crisis of faith that resulted in the decision by Sister Bernadette (Laura Main) to leave the religious order. The reasons for that decision, and the many consequences that flow from it, are a major part of Season Three, which also introduces new characters and sees several major life transitions.

As with Season Two, the third season of Call the Midwife was preceded by a Christmas Special broadcast on December 25, 2013 in the U.K. and during the following week on PBS in the U.S. The core of the special was the much-anticipated wedding between the series' reliable physician, Dr. Patrick Turner (Stephen McGann) and the former Sister Bernadette, soon to be Shelagh Turner. Wedding plans are complicated by Dr. Turner's frantic efforts to administer the newly developed polio vaccine to all the children of the East End's Poplar district as an outbreak of the disease threatens the densely populated area. As if that weren't enough of a challenge, an undetonated German bomb is unearthed near Nonnatus House during excavation for new construction, and the entire neighborhood is forced to evacuate and seek shelter while disarmament specialists attempt to neutralize the threat. (Such discoveries continued to be made for many years after World War II.)

Season Three is set in 1959, and it is marked by a new location for Nonnatus House, after its prior home was marked for demolition by the Council team that includes Alec Jesmond (Leo Staar). Nurse Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine, with Vanessa Redgrave as the narrating voice of the elder Jenny) has succumbed to Alec's infectious good humor to the extent of dating him regularly. She seems happy enough, but there are mixed signals. When Alec invites her to spend a weekend with him in Brighton (episode 4), she hesitates. Thereafter, their relationship takes a stunning turn.

Nurse Trixie Miller (Helen George) continues to act the part of the light-hearted flapper, but her devil-may-care attitude is routinely belied by the commitment she brings to her work. In the Christmas Special, she tries to help a patient's husband who is suffering from what was then still commonly called "shell shock". Later, she faces the grim realities of a women's penal facility, when she accompanies Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) to Holloway Prison to cover for a midwife staff that has been stricken with flu. The brightest spot in Trixie's Season Three adventures is the handsome new curate, Tom Hereward (Jack Ashton), who appears to be very interested in Trixie but is constantly canceling their dates on account of his duties. Or is there another reason?

Nurse Camilla "Chummy" Noakes (Miranda Hart) is enjoying motherhood with her son, Freddy, who was born at the conclusion of Season Two, but Chummy misses the camaraderie and the sense of making a difference in her work at Nonnatus House. Several circumstances, including a royal visit, conspire to return Chummy to her former position on a part-time basis, but this leads to conflicts with her long-suffering husband, Constable Peter Noakes (Ben Caplan), as neither of their jobs obeys the clock, and Baby Freddy must always have someone to look after him. An even greater challenge awaits Chummy at the season's end, when her tyrannical mother, Lady Browne (Cheryl Campbell), suddenly materializes from abroad, casting a withering eye on Chummy and everything in her life. But Lady Browne's return is more significant than it first appears. Among other things, it will lead to Chummy's realization that, as a wife, mother and accomplished professional, she has truly grown up.

Nurse Cynthia Miller (Bryony Hannah) experiences the least change in Season Three. Despite her small stature, she remains one of the strongest and most reliable presences among the midwives of Nonnatus House. Perhaps that it why, when one of their patients experiences a severe case of post-partum mental disorder (episode 7), it is only Nurse Miller whom she will allow to visit her.

Season Three sees two new arrivals to cope with the ever-expanding workload. One is a young nun called Sister Winifred (Victoria Yeates), who doesn't take easily to midwifery. Her future at Nonnatus House is uncertain. The other is Nurse Patsy Mount (Emerald Fennell), whose brusque bedside manner initially strikes Sister Julienne, the seasoned chief of the operation, as inappropriate. But there is a reason why Nurse Mount approaches her work this way, and it emerges when she is the only one who correctly recognizes that the cause of a home-care patient's continuing deterioration is a rare condition contracted during World War II.

Long-time members of the Nonnatus House staff continue to fulfill their customary roles. Sister Julienne's firm but gentle hand is evident throughout. Handyman Fred Buckle (Cliff Parisi) continues to fall for quick-buck schemes but is always a strong shoulder when help is truly needed. The elderly Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) remains prone to flights of wild non sequiturs, but those who know her have learned to pay attention, because the depth of her knowledge remains impressive, even if the expression is bizarre. It is Sister Monica Joan who identifies the cause of respiratory distress in two children birthed from the same mother; the vital clue was in one of her old books (episode 1). At the opposite end of the spectrum is Sister Evangelina (Pam Ferris), who remains a hard-headed paragon of common sense. Season Three finds Sister Evangelina approaching her "jubilee", the fifty-year anniversary of her taking vows as a nun. For personal reasons, Sister Evangelina wants no celebration, but she is overruled by her colleagues. The sight of the stony sister beaming with delight as a line of well-wishers, each of whom she helped usher into the world, hands her flowers and other small gifts—they include Dr. Turner's son, Timothy (Max Macmillan)—captures much of the appeal that has won Call the Midwife such a devoted following.

As of this writing, another Christmas Special has been announced for December 2014 with a fourth season to follow in 2015. These new installments will have to cope both with key shifts in the series' relationships and with a new decade, as Call the Midwife enters the Sixties. Given the consistently high quality of both the writing and the production values in Season Three, the creative team should be more than up to the challenge.

Call the Midwife: Season Three Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Like Season Two, Season Three of Call the Midwife has been encoded at 1080p on two BD-50s, using the AVC codec. Disc 1 contains episodes 1-4, plus the Christmas Special, while disc 2 contains episodes 5-8, plus a single brief extra. Both the visual style and the video quality are consistent with those of Season Two, except to the extent that the production design and costumes have changed to reflect the times. Women's fashions are somewhat bolder and more colorful, particularly for someone like Trixie (a point made by Helen George in her interview segment). Signs of an improving economy are finally trickling down to the East End, as urban renewal reaches Poplar; less war rubble and more new construction is in evidence (which is how the undetonated German bomb in the Christmas Special is uncovered).

Three cinematographers are credited for Season Three's episodes, but the visual style of Call the Midwife was established in its first season and continues to be replicated with the Arri Alexa. Detail remains impressive, blacks are solid, and the image retains the slightly faded quality that marks it as historical, though the fading effect is noticeably less pronounced in Season Three, perhaps because the Fifties are ending. Noise or artifacts are almost wholly absent, and if BBC Home Video would spread these episodes across three Blu-ray discs instead of two, my guess is that the image would be perfect.

Call the Midwife: Season Three Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Apparently continuing its audio encoding experiments with Call the Midwife, BBC Home Video has tried yet a third format for Season Three. This time, it has opted for DTS 2.0, but with a low bitrate of 256 kbps. To my ear, this offered no meaningful improvement over the Dolby Digital 2.0 (at 192 kbps) used with Season Two's Blu-ray release, and certainly did not replicate the quality of the lossless PCM 2.0 audio track heard on Season One. If BBC is going to pay licensing fees to Dolby or DTS, it might as well license one of their lossless formats (TrueHD or DTS-MA HD) and deliver Call the Midwife's stereo soundtrack at the best possible quality. If the extra space requirements force the use of a third disc, so much the better; the video quality should also benefit.

In general, the sound design is consistent with that of the series' prior seasons, with priority given to dialogue and music. The low-bitrate DTS track doesn't sound bad; it just doesn't reproduce the sound of Call the Midwife as well as we know that Blu-ray can and should (which the Season One discs amply demonstrated).

Call the Midwife: Season Three Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Cast and Crew Interviews (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:57): This is a very good, but far too brief, series of interviews with executive producer Pippa Harris and actors Jessica Raine, Helen George, Bryony Hannah and Miranda Hart. Harris discusses the series' turn toward original stories, and the actors describe their characters in Season Three. (Note that PBS used excerpts from these interviews for part of the short "afterwords" that followed their broadcasts, but they also used original material from their own interviews with the cast. That PBS material is not included here.)



• Trailers: At startup, each of the two discs plays trailers that can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not available once the disc loads. Disc 1 plays trailers for The Paradise: Season One and BBC America. Disc 2 plays trailers for Brazil with Michael Palin, Earth Journeys and Last Tango in Halifax.

Call the Midwife: Season Three Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Season Three was the first time I watched any episodes of Call the Midwife on PBS, which is when I first noticed that PBS shortens each episode by about ten minutes. Although the editing is careful enough that the trims do not cause obvious interruptions, any true fan of Call the Midwife will want to see every minute. That is yet another reason to acquire this Blu-ray set (and the sets for Seasons One and Two, which I suspect were similarly trimmed for their PBS broadcasts), if the Blu-ray's improvement in image quality weren't already incentive enough. Call the Midwife has the kind of multi-layered plotting, nuanced performances and period production design that rewards repeat viewing, and Season Three is highly recommended.