'Call the Midwife's Season 14 Trailer Prays for the 1970s

Since the series' debut in 2012, Call the Midwife has been the gold standard of ensemble period pieces. It ushered in a new era of cooperation between the BBC and PBS, where a BBC show was allowed to premiere the same day on PBS as it did in the U.K. as a regular occurrence, starting with the series' first Christmas special. It also made advancing one year per season the default option for many period-set shows that followed in its wake. However, there's a bit of "victim of its own success," creeping in after a decade and a half on the air, with series creator Heidi Thomas discovering her 1950s era post-war series has grown into a 1970s-set morality tale of a country grappling with its collapsing fortunes.

It was one thing when a series set in 1956 reached 1960; at the time, the show had just seen the departure of original star Jessica Raine as Jenny Lee after three seasons, and was reconfiguring itself away from being based on the memoirs of real-life nursing sister Jennifer Worth with Lee as the main character and into a larger ensemble where co-stars Laura Main as the former nun Sister Bernadette-turned-happily married Shelagh Turner, and Helen George as the lovelorn Nurse Trixie were the twin centers around which the series turned.

The era was still early enough for Call the Midwife to continue to feel like a post-war series, and no one thought twice about what might happen ten years down the road. After all, what were the chances Call the Midwife would still be as popular as ever in the U.K., let alone the U.S., by the time the mid-2020s rolled around? But here we are, and here too are our favorite midwives and nuns, entering the decade of growing conservatism and nationalism that would spawn punk rock, Margaret Thatcher, and Princess Diana.