BY MIKE HALE c. 2012 New York Times News Service
THERE ARE MANY things we can learn from PBS’s splendidly refined British import “Downton Abbey,” like how to serve soup and what to do when a Turkish diplomat dies in your bed.
But there are other areas of life, entire chapters of existence, to which it offers no guide.
For those, we now have “Call the Midwife.”
“It is not easy to deliver a placenta,” Jessica Raine said from London, where she was filming her second season as the idealistic young nurse at the center of the BBC series. “It’s very — tactile.”
That’s not information you’re likely to get from Lord and Lady Grantham at the abbey.
“Call the Midwife,” which begins a six-week run Sunday night on PBS, and “Downton Abbey” are set in disparate worlds: the country house of a British earl around the time of World War I, and the slums of London’s East End in the late 1950s.
With its vivid depictions and discussions of the reproductive process — from violently painful childbirth to the discoveries of “shocking discharge” and alarming syphilitic chancres — “Call the Midwife” is anything but genteel.
But the two historical dramas are closely linked through an accident of timing.
After the dizzying success of the first two seasons of “Downton Abbey” on ITV in Britain and PBS in America, “Call the Midwife” came along in January on BBC and, seemingly out of nowhere, matched and by some measures exceeded the earlier show’s accomplishment.
The first season of “Midwife” averaged 8.7 million viewers in Britain, beating the 8.4 million of the first season of “Downton” despite some last-minute schedule shifting by ITV that was seen as being not entirely cricket.
PBS, lucky enough to broadcast both shows in the United States, can only hope they engage in a similar ratings contest here. (The third season of “Downton” is being broadcast in Britain and will appear on PBS beginning in January.)
Corresponding by e-mail as she worked on the second season of “Midwife,” Heidi Thomas, the show’s writer, wrote: “Only after we were broadcast, and seemed to enter the national consciousness in a similar way, did we take a step back and say: ‘Why do people love both shows equally? What is the connection between the two?'”
“I think perhaps the very fact that they are so different has given the audience permission to enjoy both,” she continued.
“There is no sense at all that the two shows are in competition, or even breathing the same air. You really can be dementedly in love with both ‘Call the Midwife’ and ‘Downton,’ and no one will ask you to explain or to apologize.”
Ms. Thomas became involved with “Midwife” when Pippa Harris, who would be her fellow executive producer on the show, urged her to take a look at the trilogy of memoirs written by Jennifer Worth, a nurse who worked as a midwife in the East End in the 1950s.
Published in the 2000s, long after the events they described, Worth’s books became word-of-mouth hits, selling close to a million copies in Britain.
“They’re both incredibly emotional and also at times very funny, and at times very shocking,” Ms. Harris said. “They’re a very unusual blend. What stood out for me in terms of television drama is that birth itself is naturally very dramatic. The stakes are always very high.”
That idea is communicated right away in “Call the Midwife” when Vanessa Redgrave, who narrates the show as the voice of the older Jennifer Worth, intones: “Midwifery is the very stuff of life. Every child is conceived in love or lust and born in pain, followed by joy or by tragedy and anguish.”
The show Ms. Thomas and Ms. Harris brought into the world, working with the directors Philippa Lowthorpe and Jamie Payne, is more earthy and rollicking than Worth’s high-flown prose would indicate. (Worth was alive when the project began in 2009 but died in 2011 before it was broadcast.)
The messiness, pain and danger of childbirth are contrasted with the humor and melodrama of life at Nonnatus House, the modest convent where experienced nuns and callow young nurses work together, sometimes testily, to care for the neighborhood’s overworked, underserved mothers.
The dichotomy among the characters is reflected in the cast, with relatively unknown actresses like Ms. Raine and Helen George playing the fledgling nurses and a set of well-loved veterans playing the nuns, including Jenny Agutter, Judy Parfitt and Pam Ferris.
For the younger cast members it was a time “to sit back and watch and learn,” Ms. Raine said.
Ms. Ferris, known to PBS viewers for her performances in “Little Dorrit” and the horticultural mystery series “Rosemary & Thyme,” often sets the tone of “Midwife” with her performance as the crotchety and indefatigable Sister Evangelina, based on an actual nun and nurse who parachuted into World War II battlefields.
“I’ve been delighted at people’s reactions,” Ms. Ferris said. “One of my favorite letters was from a woman who said, ‘I watched it with my 12-year-old daughter, and with the help of the show I was able to explain how children were born.’ ”
That should please Ms. Thomas, who said she was happy that “Call the Midwife” had, quite unintentionally, reignited a debate about British health-care policies and the fate of the National Health Service.
“But I think much of the show’s appeal is universal,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s a drama about caring, and that made people care.”
And she reiterated that “Call the Midwife” and “Downton Abbey” could happily coexist.
“We have nuns, enemas and quite a lot of ladies removing their undergarments,” she said. “They don’t have any of those, as far as I’m aware. But both shows are funny, and involving, and make a big thing out of afternoon tea.”
