caitmcg

The DVDs of each season are pretty much available at the time the seasons first airs on PBS (they are promoted when it's on), so they've been out since spring.

I do think that, in that clip, that his accent betrays more of a NY background than it does elsewhere on TWW, thanks to his pronunciation of 'r'. Often his speech seems highly enunciated and and slightly clipped, which contributes to its distinctive cadence. It's not unusual for people to betray more of the regional accent of their childhoods when their voices are raised, however. Interestingly, per the Wikipedia entry BManilowe linked, Silver had a lot of language study under his belt, with a BA in Spanish and Chinese, and an MA in Chinese History; since he studied in Taiwan, he probably had proficiency in Mandarin at that point. From that entry:

He sounded Northeastern to me, but not as if he has a New York accent, based on my experience from living in NYC. And there were aspects of his inflection and manner of enunciation that are unlike anyone else I’ve heard, from anywhere in the country, and quite distinctive. (Incidentally, my mother, who grew up in and around NYC, is very keyed to the subtle differences between her pronunciation of vowels in certain words as a native of the Northeast and that of my brother and me, who grew up in California, but she does not now and has never had a “New York” accent.)

He really doesn't have a New York accent, and if Ron Silver ever spoke with an accent influenced by a specific Outer Boroughs neighborhood (and the way Bruno sounds sure doesn't resemble any I've heard), as someone working (and trying to get work) in film and television, he likely would have ditched it. Not all natives of NYC have discernible "New York" accents, even those of earlier generations, in my experience. As is often the case, there are various factors that contribute, including geography and socioeconomics. At any rate, his speech is somewhat sui generis to my American ears.

I baked a birthday cake for my friend's daughter, vanilla sponge layers with sliced strawberries between them, frosted with strawberry whipped cream. For the frosting, I used Stella Parks's super-thick and fruity food processor whipped cream recipe made with freeze-dried strawberries. First time I've done it, and I have to say it's a great idea — it tastes strongly of real strawberries, is very easy to work with, and she claims it will last up to a week in the fridge without weeping thanks to using the freeze-dried fruit. My one piece of advice is to really scrape the ground fruit/sugar mixture out of the edges of the processor before adding the cream because it wanted to stick there.

My mother said the same thing about my aunt (her older sister), who got married in the late 1950s at 19, which marriage lasted about a year — that they wanted to sleep together, but figured they had to get married to do so.

This may not be the place for a whole debate, but I both feel greatly for her surviving family, most of all for her daughter of course, and think it is helpful to remember that for those who die of suicide the true cause of death is mental illness (depression and other). While the kind of feelings Quof mentions seem mind-boggling to those of us on the outside, people suffering through depression (as Andy Spade said publicly after her death was true of his wife) often can't see outside its grip, even if receiving mental health care. We as a society are still so much more judgmental about diseases of mental health than physical.

Very sad that she was in a place that led her to take her own life. Apparently, they have a 13-year-old daughter. Wish the family well.

Reading the PTV recaps, it doesn't sound as if they edited out many scenes with Sr. J. The show's just sidelining her for some inexplicable reason, such that we mostly only ever saw her in her office or in a meal scene. She was barely seen in any active midwifery or nursing, which we did see in past seasons, so she had little interaction with the community beyond Nonnatus House.

I don't think I'd characterize Phyllis completing the psalm at Barbara's bedside as praying, actually. As others have pointed out, she did it as solace to Tom, the beloved husband of her dear friend, who was too bereft to go on. If he'd been able to complete the prayer himself, she wouldn't have chimed in (as she didn't before he broke down), nor would she have opened her mouth while attending a church service for a friend's funeral or wedding rites. Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed by the edits along with everyone else, but my reaction while watching was solely that Phyllis was doing it strictly as a comfort to Tom because she is a keen reader of emotion and generous that way. I guess I didn't find it confusing because she is so up-front about her atheism (even especially with Tom and the nuns), I can't imagine her making a show of praying. A couple of people have mentioned this, but I don't think PBS itself is responsible for the edits. I know that, at least for the first couple of seasons, some PBS stations (including my local, KQED) showed the uncut episode on first airing, though the edited episode has only ever been available for streaming on the PBS website, as well as on US Netflix. Then poof, those went away. But this season has been different, in that when in the past I read bits that had been edited out in PTV recaps or on other sites, they were quite minor in the scheme of things, and not some of the more egregious edits of this season (especially in the one episode with Magda and the Pakistani family). I wonder if the editing was done by a new third-party company or something.

That seems rather unlikely, given Lucille’s faith, not to mention that they’ve just done a multi-season arc of that exact story.

There have been at least four marriages within the main cast (Chummy, Sheilagh, Fred, and Barbara), a few break ups, two children born (Chummy's and Sheilagh's), two adopted (the little girl and the Buckle's son), and now two deaths (unless I'm missing one). For time to stand still, you'd need to recast the children every single year. Most of the stories I've loved when it comes to the cast have taken time to evolve, and would never have happened in any believable way in a single year. For me, the focus of the show is not the baby of the week, but the ongoing story of the midwives and their lives. Different strokes, I guess. Yeah, I guess it doesn't seem a huge jump to me to have each season set in an ensuing year, with each Christmas special taking place at the holidays. Nor do most dramas that run for more than three seasons stay in a static time, even if set in the past. It's not as if they're jumping way ahead the way a few shows have done (hell, Downton Abbey covered 20 years in five seasons, with no one visually aging a bit); they've gone from what, 1957 to 1963 over seven seasons. I don't think there's any way they could've kept it going more than three without advancing time, practically speaking, due to cast turnover. But as Clanstarling said, different strokes.

The preview for the next (last) episode showed the funeral procession. But we know from the end of last season that her parents went abroad (don’t remember where) for two or three years when her father got a missionary assignment (this caused them to move up the wedding so he could officiate), so I don’t know if she’ll have family.

PBS has done this since season 1, pretty much every episode. At least on MPT. And yes, it is potentially gross, so I think the warning is warranted. This is the first season I have seen it on my PBS channel,.....Buffalo/Toronto Interesting that practice varies between PBS stations. The warning has been consistently shown before every episode on KQED (at least since S2, when I started watching on broadcast) and also on the streamed episodes on PBS.org. I've always assumed it was down to the birth scenes, which are more graphic (and realistic) than in other TV shows, coupled with the early airing time (first hour of primetime, so-called "family hour"). Naturally, there's nothing like it on Netflix, as Netflix just states film/TV ratings in the movie or series description.

Assume I'm not the only one who, as soon as the concept was introduced, immediately jumped to...the very FNL plot point that was then cited as an example.

The recap is here. If they don't link it, just click on PreviouslyTV at the top of the page to go to the site home page, and you should see it there.

Totally thrown in there the same way other common, and less common, medical conditions associated with pregnancy have been just "totally thrown in there" over the previous 6 seasons, you mean? I am honestly surprised they'd never featured a pregnant woman with pica before. As others have noted, it's not uncommon.

I really don't think it's so far-fetched that the midwives, including even the nuns (who aren't Catholic, after all) are accepting of married couples having access to contraception (the only people who could legally acquire anything but condoms at the time in the UK, as in the US) by the early '60s. After all, they have spent years attending to poor East End families having child after child, even when they could barely afford to feed them, and weren't always happy about one more addition.

Hallelujah! I've been waiting for it to show up somewhere, since Netflix ditched it. Just added to my watchlist.

I don't think it was so much that she didn't understand it as that she was a product of the times. Divorce was very rare back then and there was a lot of emphasis placed on how it was damaging to kids to see their parents split. Trying to repair the marriage at all costs was looked at as admirable and worthwhile. And, yes, women who dated divorced men were thought to be perhaps a bit morally lax. Times have changed as has the idea that even a bad marriage is better than a divorce. Trixie was just responding to the message and the mores of the era. And, as we've seen before, Trixie really does love Alexandra and wants her to be happy. I can see her feeling that it was better to end the relationship with Christopher than risk ruining his daughter's childhood. Yes, I think we saw that part of it reflected in Christopher hesitating to even tell Trixie he was divorced and had a child last season, for fear she wouldn't be interested in seeing him.

I brought my reply to @Rap541 over from the S7E03 thread. That is really not how the show portrayed it, IMO (and I am watching in the US, so I do not see cut scenes). Trixie's drinking problem wasn't introduced out of the blue as a full-blown issue, it was built up subtly over a period of time that made you see where it was going. Yes, Trixie enjoyed drinking socially with her fellow midwives, but she also turned to drinking more and more for emotional succor, on her own, and she was somewhat self-aware about it, before the blackout episode. We were shown that, without being walloped over the head about it. Whatever your personal definition of alcoholism, I agree with anna0582 that addiction doesn't necessarily fit stereotypes, and is more about the extent to which drinking (in this case) becomes a necessity to the person, something they cannot do without to the extent it has an impact on everyday life, rather than a simple pleasure. I also disagree that it is gratuitous, plot-wise. Trixie has been on since the beginning, and is one of the best-developed characters. We know more of her backstory than we have of anyone else's, and we know that she had a difficult early life and why; this seems a reasonable character progression to me, five years in, in show time, as does the difficulty she's had in confiding the truth even to her closest friends and colleagues, with whom she lives (it was quite a while before she confessed to anyone but Sister Julienne, whom she had to tell in order to take the time off to go to AA). That reluctance and shame seems entirely authentic to the period; it would be anachronistic for her to readily share it the way many in recovery do today.

Taking my reply to the Trixie thread.

There are Lutheran nuns, too. And Buddhist nuns, if one wants to look beyond Christianity.

I don't know whether this is true for CTM, but I've been told that iTunes has the UK version of Downton Abbey, rather than the PBS version, which is cut differently. (In that case, my understanding is that the two versions are edited differently, rather than the PBS version being simply cut, as with CTM.)

Yeah, they're the same as the broadcast episodes, AFAIK.