Don't Expect Chummy In 'Call The Midwife' Season 6

Many beloved characters have come and gone on Call the Midwife over the years. And if you're not all caught up on the series, I suggest you avert your eyes now, because there are some major SPOILERS ahead. Jenny (Jessica Raine) left Nonnatus House to become a nurse, and Sister Evangelina (Pam Ferris) sadly passed away at the end of Season 5. But there's one character who I still continue to hold out hope that she'll make her triumphant return to the series in the future: Camilla Noakes (Miranda Hart), but we all lovingly know her as Chummy. Now that another installment of this British period drama is upon us, I have to wonder if Chummy will be in Season 6 of Call the Midwife.

Chummy's return to Call the Midwife actually looked promising about a year ago. Hart was actually set to reprise her role as Chummy, the nurse married to PC Peter Noakes who was last seen in Season 4 as she went off to run the Mother and Baby Home, briefly in the 2016 holiday special and in Season 6 of Call the Midwife, which premieres on Sunday, April 2 at 8 p.m. ET on PBS. “We’ve been bursting to share the news that Chummy has now left the Mother and Baby Home and is heading back to Poplar for series six,” a spokesman for Call the Midwife's production company Neal Street Productions told The Guardian in April 2016. “We’re thrilled to be once again featuring Miranda Hart and her fabulous blend of warmth, strength and vulnerability, as Chummy gets to grips with the medical and social challenges of the 1960s.”

Hart expressed her excitement about returning to the series on Twitter at the time. "Tis true CHUMMY'S BACK!" she tweeted. "Lovely to know people are as pleased as I am about it."

Unfortunately, that celebration was short-lived. Hart broke the sad news that she would not be returning to Call the Midwife after all on Twitter last August. "News: it's with a heavy heart that having shared Chummy's return to CTM, I've not been able to birth (pun) the schedule to make it work," she wrote.

Hart hoped that fans would still tune in for the new season of Call the Midwife even if she wasn't on it, especially since famed British actor Dame Harriet Walter joins the cast to play Sister Ursula, who is appointed the new head of Nonnatus House. "Truly sad not to be playing Chummy this year but fans are in for a treat with Dame Harriet Walter as a new cast member and more besides," Hart tweeted last August.

Call the Midwife's creative team apparently didn't have much notice about Hart pulling out of the season. “We were thrilled when Miranda approached us, and I storylined the series for her, but at relatively short notice she had to withdraw," Heidi Thomas, the creator, writer, and executive producer of Call the Midwife, told RadioTimes in January. "We were hopeful right up to the end that we could make it work, but we couldn’t.”

That meant that Thomas had to do a bit of reworking of the season sans Chummy. “I just rewrote the series without Miranda in it, which was sad because we would have loved having her in it," Thomas explained to RadioTimes. “She is part of the CTM family. But [this time] it wasn’t meant to be.”

Indeed, it looks like we all just need to accept the fact that Season 6 of Call the Midwife will be Chummy-less. However, that doesn't mean you have to live your life completely Hart-less (ha!).

The actor has kept plenty busy since her time on Call the Midwife. She made an even bigger name for herself among American audiences as the friend and CIA colleague of Melissa McCarthy's character in the hit 2015 comedy Spy. She published a book about her adventures with her dog titled Peggy & Me last October and released another book called Miranda's Daily Dose of Fun earlier this month. Hart also appeared in this year's Red Nose Day broadcast on the BBC.

If you happen to find yourself in London this spring, you can see Hart make her West End debut as Miss Hannigan in a revival of the classic musical Annie, which officially opens on June 5, Playbill reports. Hart was also cast as the fairy Dew Drop in Disney's upcoming retelling of The Nutcracker titled The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Variety reported last October.

So I have a feeling that we'll be seeing lots more of Hart in the future, whether she returns to Call the Midwife or not.