Live HistoricSee what matters.

Series · Netflix · 2012

Pass it on

Call the Midwife

53Watch it awake.

Work, a parish, and women who do not leave when the hour gets ugly. Put it on.

The review

This is the rare show on a home screen that knows what a neighborhood is for. A woman is in labor. Someone comes. The someone is trained, tired, and answerable to a house of women who pray and to a street that will still be there on Monday. The stories do not pretend every birth is a blessing without a cost. They do insist that the cost is borne by people, not by a mood.

Watch it. Then notice how little of your own week is spent on a person who cannot pay you back. The standard is not the habit or the bicycle. It is the decision to be in the room when it would be easier to be somewhere cleaner.

Journal

Keep Call the Midwife in the record.

No house has filed a sentence for this yet.

Live Historic number 53. Yours can differ.

The glance

Temperance is the thin one.

Is appetite shown and then put down, or are you being trained to want the next one?

This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.

Consider this

Band of Brothers

71 instead of 53

Band of Brothers is still a drama show, and it scores 71 instead of 53. What you gain is courage: They jump, they hold, they go back for the wounded.

The eight

6
Industry
The labor is the plot. Birth is work, and so is the visit the next morning.
6
Household
Houses that are cramped, married, widowed, or barely holding. The child still has to arrive somewhere.
5
Piety
Prayer is not decoration. The nuns mean it, and the nurses who do not still keep the watch.
5
Courage
They go into rooms that smell, and they do not flinch for the camera.
5
Republic
A neighborhood, a clinic, the poor. The unit is the parish, not the personality.
4
Temperance
Suffering is shown and then bound up. It is not lingered over for sport.
5
Truth
The hard cases are told plainly: poverty, shame, a secret, a child no one planned.
6
Stewardship
Every episode asks what will be left standing for the child who just took a breath.

Where to watch

Finding the page.

Live Historic · Call the Midwife · 53IMDb tt1983079

Live HistoricSee what matters.

Series · Netflix · 2010

Pass it on

The Great British Baking Show

40Leave it.

A craft, a deadline, and a tent where kindness is not a joke. Worth the evening.

Take controlThis scores 40. If you do not want The Great British Baking Show in the house, the steps are on Netflix. Block it

The review

Most contests teach you to enjoy someone else's mistake. This one teaches you to watch a person try. The handshake matters more than the trophy, and the technical challenge is a small sermon on the only kind of honesty a kitchen allows: the thing you made is the thing you meant, or it isn't.

It will not save a soul. It will not lie to you about what patience looks like. Watch an episode and then bake, or mend, or do any job whose result can be set on a table and judged by people who love you. That is the use of it.

Journal

Keep The Great British Baking Show in the record.

No house has filed a sentence for this yet.

Live Historic number 40. Yours can differ.

The glance

Household and Piety and Courage and Republic are the thin ones.

Is a marriage, a parent, or a child a real life here, or just a prop?

This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.

Consider this

The Incredible Dr. Pol

63 instead of 40

The Incredible Dr. Pol is still a reality show, and it scores 63 instead of 40. What you gain is industry: Veterinary medicine, day and night, in the mud.