It's a bit of a Trojan horse. It absolutely has twee "Brexit telly" aesthetics, and some of the characters are too saintly to be human (the GP character in particular, and some of the nuns) ...

but underneath that twee syrup it has genuine heft and substance - much more so than the vast majority of tv dramas (let alone Sunday afternoon telly). Its portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth is consistently very realistic, medically accurate (including an accurate reflection of medical practice and maternity care at that time in history), and very unsentimental. Those nuns and midwives don't just sit around having plucky British tea parties under homemade bunting - they consistently deal with extraordinarily gnarly life-and-death situations, and the ptsd is real (childbirth is metal - like, it's actual real-life body horror). They regularly face genuinely harrowing situations not only in terms of obstetric emergencies, but also in terms of the living conditions and life situations of a lot of their patients (the show doesn't sugarcoat the lived reality in the poverty of the East End in the 1950s).

And - while the show doesn't challenge the viewer very much in terms of moral ambiguity (it very much spoonfeeds the viewer in terms of who is in the right and who is in the wrong whenever there's a plot involving a moral conflict), the actual values that the show embodies are very enlightened and progressive in many, many ways. If there's wider "lessons" it tries to teach, they are about being inclusive and nonjudgmental, about the importance of caring for each other, and - crucially- about never turning your back on people who are marginalized and often reviled or dismissed by society. Those nuns and midwives are there for everybody, and treat all their patients with dignity and respect and compassion and kindness, no matter whether they are assisting a neat and respectable married woman excited about her first child, or a prostitute giving birth in a dingy brothel, or a desperately poor mother-of-six who is bleeding out after procuring an illegal back alley abortion. Those values are the antithesis of everything that Brexit represents.

And it absolutely, fervently portrays the importance and value of the NHS, especially in the early seasons which begin more or less at the time the NHS was first established, and you very much get to see the reality that people faced without it. Not only that, but it also shows very starkly why social care is life-saving (the midwives essentially serve as social workers in many ways), why social safety nets should be non-negotiable (and nobody should be judged for needing them), why we need good quality affordable housing and the life and death difference that council housing made to people in the post-war era, and it humanizes disabled people (including people with developmental disabilities and serious mental sickness) in a way that is still rare, even today.

Sometimes, those progressive messages are delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but a lot of the time they are interwoven into the plot very well - much better than most tv dramas. This is meant to be comfort telly, not a hard hitting gritty drama.

So anyway, I can forgive the syrup and the twee aesthetics. There is more than enough substance and bite underneath it, and even within the syrupy layers of the show, there is some genuine character growth, grief, love, and unlikely friendships spanning social class and age groups. And I do like that the storytelling uncompromisingly centres such a large and varied group of women - half of whom are nuns, for heaven's sake. How many tv dramas are there that portray nuns as actual humans, and not either evil, or comic relief side characters?

I mean, in one episode, sister Evangelina climbs up a fricken ship's rope ladder in her nun's habit, wimple flapping, in a storm in the middle of the night, determined to get on board a Swedish cargo ship and assist in the labour of a serial rape victim trapped on there, trafficked by her dad to "serve" the crew. Sister Evangelina isn't young, and she injures herself climbing that ladder, but that doesn't stop her delivering that baby safely and then giving the ship's crew a very unambiguous piece of her mind, scaring them all half to death. That's a top notch tv drama storyline, right there!