TV Shows Like Call the Midwife
If you like Call the Midwife, here are 11 similar TV shows — each with its current AI renewal verdict, so you can see which are still going and which have been cancelled.
BBC One · Drama · Call the Midwife is likely renewed
Call the Midwife earns its loyal audience not through plot twists but through people. Set in the East End of London in the 1950s, it follows midwives and nuns delivering babies into some of the poorest households in Britain, and it never flinches from the hardship. What makes it work is the combination of period detail, genuine warmth, and a willingness to sit with difficult subjects, poverty, illness, unwanted pregnancy, infant loss, without sensationalising any of them. The show is sentimental, yes, but it earns those tears because the characters feel real and the social history underneath them is treated with care.
The best shows like Call the Midwife
1. The Resident
Like Call the Midwife, The Resident is genuinely interested in what medicine looks like from the inside, the compromises, the bureaucracy, and the moments of real human connection that survive all of it. The tension between an idealistic newcomer and a more experienced colleague who has learned to work within a flawed system echoes the dynamic between new recruits and seasoned nurses in Poplar. It is sharper and more cynical in tone, but the core concern with what good care actually means in practice is the same.
Stream on Netflix, Hulu, Netflix Standard with Ads
Cancelled0%
2. Agatha Christie's Marple
Miss Marple inhabits roughly the same mid-century English world as Call the Midwife, all village fetes, tea cups, and a society in quiet transition, and there is real pleasure in that shared sense of period and place. The show has the same fondness for an observant woman whose intelligence is underestimated by the men around her. If the mysteries are the main draw, the texture of the era is the bonus, and fans of Midwife will feel at home in it.
Stream on Hulu, Britbox Apple TV Channel , PBS, Acorn TV
Ended0%
3. Casualty
Casualty is set in a busy emergency department rather than a maternity ward, but the DNA is recognisable: a ensemble of medical staff navigating both professional pressure and personal lives, in a specifically English NHS setting. The show has been running long enough to have developed real depth of character in the way Call the Midwife has, and it takes the emotional weight of its patients' stories seriously. Fans who come for the medicine and stay for the community will find something familiar here.
Stream on Britbox Apple TV Channel
Likely Renewed82%
4. The Waltons
The Waltons shares Call the Midwife's belief that the daily life of a close-knit community during a difficult historical period is genuinely worth telling. Both shows are warm without being naive, and both find drama in the small events of ordinary family and neighbourhood life rather than in grand plot mechanics. If the setting shifts from the East End to the American South, the emotional register, nostalgic, loving, a little bittersweet, is very much the same.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, Peacock Premium, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Ended0%
5. Anne with an E
Anne with an E has the period warmth and the emotional honesty that Call the Midwife fans tend to love, and it is similarly unafraid to let hard realities sit alongside genuine joy. Anne's determination to find her place in a world that was not expecting her echoes the resilience of the women in Poplar, and the show handles its social themes, poverty, exclusion, found family, with the same kind of care. It is aimed at a slightly younger audience but does not talk down to anyone.
Stream on Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Cancelled0%
More on shows like Call the Midwife
Fans of Call the Midwife tend to want a few specific things when they move on to something else. They want characters who feel like a community, not just a cast. They want stories that take ordinary lives seriously. Many of them appreciate period settings or at least a sense of place. And they respond to shows that balance heartbreak with warmth, bittersweet rather than bleak, hopeful without being dishonest about how hard things can get.
The recommendations here cover that range in different ways. Casualty shares the medical setting and the emotional texture of lives under pressure, though it is firmly contemporary. Anne with an E offers the period warmth and the emotional generosity, with a young protagonist whose resilience mirrors that of the women in Poplar. Agatha Christie's Marple is set in a similar mid-twentieth-century England and carries that same quiet, observant affection for the era, even if its concerns lean toward crime rather than care. The Waltons trades London for rural Virginia but brings the same community-centred storytelling and the same sense that ordinary family life during a hard historical period is worth dramatising seriously. The Resident sits furthest from the source show in tone and setting, but it shares the medical world and the tension between idealism and institutional reality that runs through Call the Midwife's hospital scenes.
None of these are perfect substitutes. Call the Midwife has a particular combination of things that is genuinely hard to replicate: the nuns, the Cockney streets, the babies, the Jenny Worth narration tying it all together. But each of the shows here scratches at least one of the itches that show creates, and a few of them come closer than you might expect.
More shows like Call the Midwife
Frequently asked
- What is the most popular show like Call the Midwife?
- The Resident is the most popular show similar to Call the Midwife in the IsItRenewed catalogue.
- Are shows like Call the Midwife still on the air?
- Of the 11 shows similar to Call the Midwife listed here, 1 currently carry a renewed verdict — the rest are cancelled, ended, or awaiting a decision.
- How does IsItRenewed pick shows like Call the Midwife?
- The recommendations come from TMDB's similar-titles data, and each is shown with its current AI renewal verdict so you know which are still going.