Over at Vulture yesterday, Margaret Lyons did a great public service, sorting out television dramas that have aired on both broadcast networks and cable this season by which ones featured rape or murder as plot lines, and which ones don’t. Unsurprisingly, the shows that include rape and murder—even as a one-off plot rather than a regularly featured occurrence, as in Nashville—dramatically outnumber the ones that find their stakes elsewhere, 109 to 16. As NPR critic Linda Holmes wrote last year, it’s exhausting to have a world of television where the only stakes that are treated as if they’re worthy of long-form exploration are “avoiding being violently killed.” And so I thought it was worth looking through the list of sixteen shows that haven’t gone to the rape or murder well to see what other kinds of stakes seem to be playing well—or at least moderately well—on scripted drama.

1. The realization of creative ambition: Bunheads, Glee, Smash, The Wedding Band, Nashville, Underemployed, to a certain extent The Newsroom are all shows that fall into this category. Creative ambition works well on television for a couple of reasons. Writing a song or story, preparing for a performance or a broadcast, or going after a contract or a part is an essentially procedural process: it has a beginning, middle, and an end point. Having creativity as the stakes also lets television dramas do what the most popular reality shows of the modern era of TV have done: invest audiences in big musical performances. Creativity shows run into trouble, just as reality programs like American Idol do, when they try to sell us on people who aren’t compellingly talented on their own merits, as has been the case with Smash, and is true to a certain extent with the dramatic overemphasis on the goodness of Will McAvoy in The Newsroom. But just as murder and sexual assault turn ordinary people into people who are worthy of dramatic consideration by injecting extraordinarily high stakes into their lives, creativity shows focus on people to whom we assign an extraordinary amount of societal capital in real life.

2. Period pieces: We’ve got a modest, but not extraordinarily large number of period dramas on television right now: Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and The Carrie Diaries. And it’s no mistake that three of those four shows air on PBS, which has built its brand in part in opposition to the prevailing winds of television, and is ahead of the curve on programming to viewers who are burned out on violent storylines elsewhere. It’s also done so with imports: Downton and Call The Midwife are both British shows that PBS has the rights to air. Other period shows, like The Americans, make heavy use of violence. But situating characters in the past tends to lend a sheen of significance to ordinary lives by letting those characters stand in for larger forces. Lady Mary and Cousin Matthew may be just ordinary rich people we’d find sort of irksome if they were will-they-or-won’ting-they through the twentieth century. But from a distance of decades, the reasons that it took them so long to get together, questions about their relative sexual experience, and the importance of Lady Mary’s pregnancy become unfamiliar and newly exciting.

3. Family stories: This is a category that comedy seems to be doing better, or at least with greater frequency, than drama at the moment. But NBC’s Parenthood, and ABC Family’s Switched at Birth have both been useful illustrations of how making whether or not family gets along or holds together or finds its way together can elevate other conflicts. Parenthood and Switched At Birth have been staging grounds for all kinds of other stories, including recognition of creative ambition plotlines, political involvement arcs, and illness and autism stories. If audiences get hooked by what happens when individual characters’ actions influence their group of friends, the consequences are even more significant when their actions can blow up or restore the bonds of family.

4. Procedurals with below-death stakes: In this group fall the quickly-cancelled Emily Owens M.D. and the hardier Necessary Roughness, Suits, and The Client List. The middle two are USA Network shows, which, with its Blue Sky brand, works somewhat like PBS in programming to people who want a different, but relatively predictable, tone from much of what they’re offered on networks and cable. Often the problems characters face on USA’s procedurals are engaging precisely because they’re sort of silly, or because the people who have the problems are silly, or because the means in which they’re resolved are silly. Maybe the cure for television’s rape and murder epidemic isn’t just getting more creative about the stakes involved, but in how main characters solve crimes or medical problems and reach resolutions.

Downton Abbey‘s been a tremendous hit for Masterpiece on PBS, and the public broadcaster is responding by importing another period British drama. Call the Midwife, which follows the adventures of a group of young midwives working with Anglican nuns in the exceedingly poor Poplar neighborhood in London’s East End, has been a giant hit in the UK, where its ratings beat out Downton Abbey. It’s a show about what it means for young women who aren’t yet having their own families, and who received their training in modernized hospitals, to deliver the babies of women who have much more experience in the ways of childbirth than their midwives do, and to do so in environments of extreme poverty because their patients mistrusted hospital care.

But it’s also a story about what it meant to be able to provide serious, personalized care for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the implementation of the National Health Service. Midwives made house calls, returned multiple times a day to check on the condition of frail infants, and would keep coming back as long as they were needed. Jessica Raine, who stars in Call the Midwife as a young nurse named Jenny Lee, told me:

The program really champions the NHS because it was very new. It had only just come about. And it’s difficult to imagine England without the NHS, but they didn’t have one. It was a really exciting new thing that the pooor in East London were really benefitting from, and they had not experienced it before. It champioins nurses, it champions people going out in the streetts, which I personally am really proud of becasue I don’t think people in that industry, they’re not celebrated. I love that midwifery has come to the forefront because it’s such an undocumented profession. You get to go into family’s houses, you get home visits, and every sitaution is different.

Call the Midwife is one of the rare cases of fifties or sixties nostalgia where it makes actual sense to want to bring back some elements of that period. There’s no reason to wish for the days of requiring women to have enemas and shave their pubic hair before going into labor, of course, but with serious cuts to National Health staffing underway, there’s something powerful about the dream of extremely personalized care and home support for new parents. The changes to American health care under the Affordable Care Act are just getting started, of course. But Call the Midwife is a reminder both that expanding access to care dramatically changes the lives of people who benefit from it, and requires both the medical professionals who treat them and the patients themselves to make cultural adjustments. It’s the stuff of both great drama, and of better health.