‘Call the Midwife’ season 3 premiere: What was the biggest problem for PBS?

Tonight, “Call the Midwife” premiered on PBS with its first of many season 3 episodes. It’s a fine show, and one that seems to get routinely ignored by the majority of Americans, even though they all continually flock to “Downton Abbey.” The irony here is that “Call the Midwife” is actually the more-popular show in Britain at this point, and while we enjoying Downton and its residence more as a whole, it did not have a superior season 4.

“Call the Midwife” kicked off season 3 tonight with an episode that was slow-moving, but got some of the necessary story threads out of the way for Chummy, Jenny, and some other characters. Its biggest problem? That it aired on a Sunday night on PBS in March. Let’s try to look at everything that aired on TV tonight: “Once Upon a Time,” “Resurrection,” “The Amazing Race,” “The Good Wife,” “Crisis,” “Believe,” “Cosmos,” “The Mentalist,” “Revenge,” “The Walking Dead,” “Talking Dead,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” animated comedies, and so much more. While not all of this aired against the show (and PBS was smart to premiere it at 8:00 p.m. Eastern rather than an hour later), there is only so much TV people can watch in one night.

Our suggestion for you if you are interested in this show is to go back and give the premiere a try. We’ll have some more specialized coverage for the American airings the rest of the way. In teasing the rest of the season, let’s say that the show references many interesting modern-day issues, and not all of them have to do with childbirth. You will even tear up on more than one occasion.

In the end, we just hope that the show finds more of an audience in America. It may not be as flashy as “Downton Abbey,” but does just as good of a job presenting a certain era of British life.

Did you enjoy the “Call the Midwife” premiere tonight on PBS? If so, we want to hear below.