"You were talking, I was watching
You were looking at your new friends
You were coercing
Yeah you're the worst thing that ever happened to this party"
Simon Wilcox - Mother's Ruin
Weird as it may sound given my distaste for our innate plains-ape obsession over threats to women, our emotionality and our predilection for nonsensical superstitions, I found myself captivated by Call the Midwife's first season when PBS first aired it here in the states, regardless of it being hailed as a feminist mistresswork and based on the memoirs of a Jesus-freak who blathered so much about love as a cosmic force you'd think she'd lived at a "nunnery" instead of a nunnery. For as long as (supposedly) it still clung to the memoir's original material and tone in Season 1, the show worked admirably as a period piece focused on the concerns of its time and place.
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| It's a delivery bicycle, get it? |
Interestingly though it does so by focusing on late '50s characters' own awareness of the passage of time. The endearingly caballine Chummy in particular seems a walking sequel to H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay and The Wheels of Chance. Generally though, unlike most period pieces which focus on feeding the audience points of contrast with the present the easier to foster a sense of superiority, Call the Midwife contrasted postwar society with the even paster past. Even cramped, vermin-infested tenements could be preferable to the abject poverty that preceded them, and hey, at least they closed the damn workhouses. And imagine affording an automobile, even if it is a ridiculous old jalopy. Plus a healthcare system actually struggling to get care to the poor instead of just letting them rot in the streets? What wondrous times.
By the time I got around to sampling latter seasons (when the stories had about as much to do with Jennifer Worth as with Jennifer Anniston) quality had dropped noticeably: themes and plots more contrived, acting more clownish, dialogue and editing looser and temporizing at every turn. Worse, its plots had obviously shifted anachronistically to feeding our politically correct racial/sexual narratives of the 2010s, mixed with tedious soap opera threads minutely tracking various characters' tedious lives. But I couldn't put my finger on exactly when the whole routine had gone stale, and so shrugged it off assuming season four or five would see Call the Midwife through it long-overdue cancellation. Gave it no further thought until running across it on Netflix last month when my jaw dropped at seeing eleven seaso - oh holy fiddlesticks* it's still running!
How? Why!?
Ugh, never mind.
At least it answered my old query: the show got dumbed down, instantly and violently, at the very start of Season 2. Aside from overextending the already lengthy birthing scenes, needlessly contriving a dislocated shoulder and turning a formerly short-tempered but dedicated senior nurse into a petulant bully, S2E1 also shows an abrupt escalation in male-bashing. Season 1 had shown little political agenda beyond applauding the nuns and indulging in a bit of maudlin sentimentality. Men could be remembered as kind old soldiers, young men struggling in the work force, heartless pimps, heroes, innocents or villains on a case by case basis with intrinsic value. It even acknowledged conflicts between women, notably in one death to eclampsia when a nervous mother-to-be skips her check-up due to verbal abuse by the gutter trash at the clinic. Turns out cramming a dozen hormonally challenged apes together into one room doesn't necessarily make for polite conversation.
After getting good press for showing a female viewpoint however, the show was re-tooled for female entitlement. Season 2 came out swinging with one woman complaining about her absentee husband** a father pimping his daughter (who "lived without friendship such a long time" on a ship full of men***) and browbeating her father for why it took him so long to give her the biggest cabin, plus a B-plot about a cartoonishly sputtering manic wife-beater - and of course his wife's only flaw is failing to run back to her mother - not parents mind you, but mother. And of course in a perfectly logical plot twist their apartment catches fire at the end. All that and more in one episode.
I suppose it shouldn't surprise me by now that the show's drop in quality went directly in hand with its descent into rabid chauvinism. As I've said before "propaganda is not art. It's psychological conditioning" - the more crass and repetitive, the better to beat reason into prosocial submission. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. But this 2013 flashback also serves as reminder that most of our current snowflake idiocy started with feminism, with the political lobby benefiting not only from the largest baseline of beneficiaries but from a class of victims instinctively pre-programmed to accept all abuse as part of their necessary sacrifice as providers and protectors of the self-appointed fairer sex.
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* Don't look at me like that, NUNS might read this!
** Never mind in the real world she'd bitch him out even harder if he lay
around the house in case of labor, instead of laboring at pinching every penny for her benefit.
*** Reverse the polarity: a male character being written as weeping for having "lived without friendship such a long time" while being surrounded by women doting on him and lining up to fuck him. You could reasonably read suffering in that scenario... but no modern audience would, absent the feminist conceit.
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