‘Call the Midwife’ season 3, episode 3 review (PBS): Prison blues; a Jenny – Alec story

What happened on “Call the Midwife” Sunday night? The series is still fairly procedural, and thanks to that, a pretty hefty percentage of the episode was spent talking about something that will not matter next week: The tale of Stella, a prison inmate who had to struggle with whether or not she was going to be given a chance to be a proper mother.

Luckily for her, this episode did allow her an opportunity to do that … but you can read more about details in our first review for this episode when it aired in Britain. We like to spend our US reviews talking a little bit more about specific concepts and debates, and the main issue that we had while watching this episode was pretty simple: Why in the world did we not have more of Jenny and Alec?

At times, it feels like “Call the Midwife” is a series afraid to really give us too much of any one character, either in fear that they will divert from the subject matter or some of the individual cases. From our vantage point, that is one of the biggest problems the show has. We understand the value in trying to allow the Nonnatus midwives to deal with stories that have modern-day application, but there are also so many other shows that give you that. The balance of this show at times feels about 70% procedural and 30% serial, and we wish that was a little more reversed. We didn’t have to see as much of this story in the prison that we did to get the point, and the tale of Jenny and Alec, or even the characters more involved in the prison (see: Trixie) was more interesting.

What was your take on Sunday night’s “Call the Midwife” episode? Share your thoughts with a comment below.