‘Call the Midwife’ season 4: Is Jennifer Worth’s family still on board?

“Call the Midwife” found itself in what can only be described as a moment of great creative crisis at the end of season 3. Jessica Raine, their star and one of the show’s biggest draws, had decided that she was going to depart to pursue a film career. Given that she plays a young version of the show’s lead Jennifer Worth, this is forcing the show to move away from the real Worth’s writings and in a completely different direction for the fourth season.

In turn, this is a direction that the family of Worth is not entirely pleased with. Speaking per the Daily Telegraph at a recent event, Worth’s daughter Suzannah Hart made it rather clear that  while the family was at first completely on board with everything the show was doing, that has changed over time thanks to some of the creative decisions that have been made:

“I think the first two series [were faithful], because they followed very closely my mother’s writing. But the third series has strayed quite a lot and because they’ve used up most of the material [and] Heidi Thomas, the scriptwriter, is now making the material up herself.

“She’s doing it very well and very sensitively, she’s doing her research, but it’s not the same. They’re doing a fourth series now and I don’t think there’s anything that’s any resemblance whatsoever to mother’s writing … Initially we had quite good involvement but it seems to have drifted by the wayside.”

This is basically a situation where we can see / understand all times. For the BBC, this is a business, and “Call the Midwife” is one of their most-successful series; meanwhile, for Hart and Worth’s family, they of course have a deep attachment to the original material. She is not so much calling the new show blasphemous or terrible so much as just saying that it is not the same.

Are you as excited about “Call the Midwife” as you once were after all of the changes, and do you think that it’s easy to really get enthused about it anymore? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.