‘Call the Midwife’ season 4 spoilers: Looking beyond Jessica Raine for BBC, PBS stories

Let’s start this “Call the Midwife” article off with a massive spoiler warning: If you have not watched the finale yet, stop reading now and go do so. We wouldn’t want to be the one to ruin this for you!

Now, let’s get into the meat of where the show is right now: There will be a season 4, but it will be without Jessica Raine. Her departure from the show is permanent, and it stems mostly from her own desire to go off into the world of film. It’s a similar situation to what we had with Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown Findlay on “Downton Abbey,” with the exception being that she was not killed off in the episode. Therefore, it is certainly possible that we could see Jenny Lee again at some point, but the narration at the end of the episode made that seem at least slightly unlikely.

So where does this leave the show? The basic way to answer that is that it will just keep trying to move forward and deliver the best overall product that it can. While British contracts for TV are short and do allow actors to go on to do other things more often than some other deals do, there’s not too much to worry about here when it comes to the rest of the cast. Even Vanessa Redgrave is expected to still provide some sort of presence on the show in the future (though it is kind of hard to imagine how that will be so). It is probably a good thing that there were some episodes without Raine this season, since that gave you a little bit of a sense as to what the show could be like without her.