The BBC has announced that the much-beloved series “Call the Midwife” has been renewed for three more seasons, keeping the female-centric show on the air through 2020. Three Christmas specials have also been ordered.
Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s director of content, said that the order “underlines our commitment to Britain’s most popular drama series.”
The series follows post-WWII nuns and midwives working in London during the advent of the UK’s national healthcare services. A ratings hit, the show was created by Heidi Thomas and inspired by the memoirs of former nurse Jennifer Worth.
The new seasons, the BBC detailed, will reach into the 1960s, when Britain, Thomas said, was “fizzing with change and challenge. There is so much rich material — medical, social, and emotional — to be explored. We have now delivered well over 100 babies on screen, and like those babies the stories keep on coming.”
“Call the Midwife” was the first show to have an entire season directed exclusively by women.
The sixth season of “Call the Midwife” will air in the UK beginning in early 2017 and hit the U.S. later in the spring on PBS.
