Dr Maryam Afrida (Parminder Nagra), Dr Catherine MacDiarmid (Lara Pulver), and Dr Helen Cavendish (Lisa McGrillis) are all returning to work following periods of maternity leave during the Covid lockdowns. With the NHS as it is at the moment, they are of course thrust straight on to the front line and, for various reasons and to various degrees, they all find it causes problems.
Anyone would. But to do it while juggling with child care concerns at the same time makes it even more difficult and it's not just child care that Maryam (or Maz), Catherine, and Helen have to worry about. There's stuff, different stuff, going on in their private lives too.
Maternal (ITV/ITVX, created and written by Jacqui Honess-Martin) tells their story and if it starts a bit slow (during the first two or three episodes I must admit I was not always fully captivated, that the action jumped around a bit too much and that the soundtrack sometimes felt intrusive and ill judged) then it makes up for as it develops. It eventually becomes moving, very moving, and incredibly tense.
It's worth sticking with. Maz's partner is Raz (Abhin Galeya). It's always nice to have a partner whose name rhymes with yours but Raz is not always the most sympathetic or empathetic and as Maz, we learn, has been through some tough times, that seems what she needs. She's still struggling with a colleague, Simon (Dean Ridge), who she thinks does his job badly. In turn, he's not convinced she's doing hers that well either.
Raz seems better than Helen's husband Guy (Oliver Chris). Helen are Guy are having counselling and it's not going well. There's talk about a lack of physical and emotional connection between the two of them and Guy is keen, perhaps too keen, to point out that he's not talking solely about 'conjugal rites'. He's rude to colleagues and he's rude to patients at times. He also appears to be hitting the bottle pretty hard.
Not great when Helen and Guy are still working together. Catherine's ex, Dr Jack Oliveira (Raza Jaffrey), is also on the ward (it's really quite incestuous this hospital but maybe doctors are so busy they are bound to end up in relationships with each other). Jack's a bit of a smoothie, something of a high flier. He seems a bit oily.
Catherine's also being visited by the father of her child, Lars (Alexander Karim), and he brings his wife Brigitta (Carolin Stoltz) with him. Being Swedish, it seems, this is less of a problem than you might imagine for Lars and Brigitta. Neither of them had even been aware of the child's existence until very recently but they soon agree, with only the odd mild look of disapproval from Brigitta, to take the child on as much as they can. Despite already having their own kids.
Maybe that's how it rolls in Scandinavia but it did seem quite a leap. Don't worry though, there's still drama because, if anything, Lars comes up with a plan that goes much further than Catherine had expected. All of them seem to live in nice, if often hectic - normal with kids of course - houses but Catherine's seems the nicest. She's got a big car too and we soon learn she's from a very successful family. She's very driven. Will being a mum hold her back in her career? Will her career hold her back when it comes to motherhood?
Questions, of course, that are very rarely asked of new fathers but questions, of course, that do get asked of mothers constantly. Maternal doesn't shirk how this affects Maz, Helen, and Catherine. Though they all seem reasonably well off, certainly not the case for all NHS staff, they are all bedeviled by different levels of anxiety.
Among the jokes and asides about sleepless nights, treading on their kid's toys, sore tits, and reading The Gruffalo endlessly (and far too many scenes of people going up and down in lifts) there are pointed comments about bureaucracy, clapping for carers (but not treating them better), and how undervalued doctors are in the UK. But not too pointed. Maternal manages to keep an element of soapiness in its heart and though that doesn't necessarily fit with some of the more squeamish images of operations being carried out (I'm a total wuss when it comes to medical stuff and there's way too much blood and guts on show in Maternal) it does help ground the drama in all too human concerns.
Other family members are brought into the drama. Perhaps most dramatically in the form of Helen's sister Debbie (Nicola Stephenson who you may remember as Margaret from Brookside, the one who kissed Anna Friel). Debbie has long standing dependency issues and Guy is letting her problems push him and Helen even further apart.
With all that's going in their home lives, it's a wonder there's time to show anything from the hospital but we're soon treated to a mix of the darkly humorous (a scene featuring a man with distended bollocks is played for laughs but atrophied testicles sound pretty painful to me) and the incredibly moving (cancer patients being moved to palliative care, young men coming into the hospital after being stabbed, babies surviving difficult births, and teenagers potentially not surviving life threatening illnesses).
The first really serious case we're witness to is that of four year old Edward (Dvante Hart) who arrives at hospital with a urinary tract infection and starts to deteriorate scarily quickly. It's a case that ends up haunting Maz and having her question her future in the job but it's not just her that's put under intense pressure. We see Maz, Catherine, and Helen all made to suffer absolutely dreadfully and all of them are forced to make big life changing decisions in which there is never one single entirely satisfactory answer.
As with BBC's recent This Is Going To Hurt, Maternal shows how the stress of working for the NHS affects those that do it not just in their working lives but also in their personal lives. How it's a job you can't simply switch off and how some of the coping mechanisms (in this show:- booze, extramarital sex, and suicidal ideation) may create yet further problems.
The wider cast is good too. You warm to Ridge's Simon as he leans into the empathetic aspects of his job, Cathy Tyson makes a brilliant and powerful speech in a heartwarming cameo and if colleagues and bosses like Tessa (Jennifer Macbeth), Mae (Naomi Yang), Louise (Elizabeth Dulau), and Susan (Julie Graham) feel a little underused (especially when some of them seem to be very capable actors) you can't help suspecting Maternal will be back for a second series and we'll get to know their stories better then.
Though the soundtrack didn't always work there was much of it that did (Khruangbin, Jungle, Little Simz, Pulp, Beyonce, Madonna, Arlo Parks) and, much like a regular hospital appointment itself, I left the show feeling better about it than I did when I went in. If only I could feel so positive about the future of the real NHS.
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