Maternal, ITV’s new drama about motherhood and practising medicine, opens with an alarming scene of choreographed chaos. Three female doctors, overwhelmed and hideously underslept, attempt to feed their rascal children breakfast, dress them for day care, and separate them from their overspilling toy boxes in time for drop-off. For each, it’s the first day back from maternity leave, though this hectic fire drill, or a version of it, will recreate itself every morning, just as it does in homes dotted throughout the UK and beyond (my own included). Maryam (played by Parminder Nagra) is a paediatric registrar returning to work after almost two years of continuous maternity leave. She dares to ask aloud the question that can doom a working mum – or any stripe of new mum, for that matter – to crushing guilt. “What if I hate being away from them?” she shouts to her husband across the roof of a car echoing with baby screams – “or love being away from them – that’s worse, right?”
Nagra is joined by Mum star Lisa McGrillis as Helen, a registrar in acute medicine whose cheating husband has been promoted to her boss while she’s been taking time away to raise their children. The last of the trio is Sherlock’s Lara Pulver as Catherine, a ballsy trauma surgeon slash single mum whose support system is so meagre that even her own mother asks to be taken off her list of people to be called in the case of an emergency. It’s hard to imagine that Catherine kept anything in the fridge besides wine and condiments before having her daughter, Elis. I’ve heard motherhood described as walking around the world with your heart outside your body. That’s romantic. What these actors, all three mothers in real life, convey is that the experience can render you as raw and twitchy as an exposed nerve.
The series doesn’t skimp on hospital drama; each episode features life-or-death medical puzzles that don’t always get solved. But Maternal’s central conflict – the one that binds these doctors – is so fundamental to the experience of modern motherhood that it’s almost boring: how to get through the day knowing the next day will be just as stressful. Even getting Nagra, McGrillis and Pulver on video calls together was a masterclass in parental time-blocking, which necessarily didn’t work out because kids can sense when their needs are being massaged into someone else’s schedule. When I talk to McGrillis, my toddler starts calling for me from the other side of the door to beg me to come to soft play – or, as McGrillis, who also has a two-year-old, calls it, “a full-blown cesspit”. My chat with Nagra and Pulver, real-life best friends who live near to each other in Los Angeles, is initially scheduled with a hard stop for Pulver to put her daughter down for a nap. Nagra, whose son is in his teens, is on hand to assure us that it at least gets logistically simpler over time. “But” – until then – “the juggle is real,” she says.
It’s unclear how much history Maryam, Helen and Catherine share besides the fact that they work in the same hospital and had babies at the same time. It’s McGrillis who points out that having babies at the same time is actually profoundly bonding, perhaps especially so for people who became parents against the isolation of Covid, like the three protagonists (as well as McGrillis, Pulver and me). On set in Liverpool this summer, the women and their families ordered takeout together and leaned on each other for car rides and babysitter recs; a cousin of Pulver’s husband – actor Raza Jaffrey, who also plays a doctor in Maternal – became Nagra’s nanny. McGrillis says she’s never brought more of herself to a role, or related to characters more than she relates to these overtaxed women.