Daily News, “We just thought, ‘Let’s do something set in the Civil War from the vantage point of these doctors and volunteer nurses.’ Because it’s never been done. That was the same goal set by “Mercy Street” producer Lisa Wolfinger, who told the L.A. “It seemed a wonderful way to bring the history of Civil War hospitals and medicine to a wider public.” “I did so, for about three seconds,” said Schultz, who teaches in the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. Scott Caldwell of “Lost”) demands wages for the first time, “Mercy Street” temporarily breaks its soap opera bonds.INDIANAPOLIS - When Jane Schultz, professor of English and medical humanities and director of literature at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, was asked to be a historical consultant for “Mercy Street,” a PBS Civil War medical drama series, she said she would think about it. When a laundress (Shalita Grant) explains freedom to a young slave, or a freed servant (L. It’s notable that while the black characters’ story lines are secondary to those of the white nurses and doctors - in the PBS cast list, the first six actors are white - their scenes tend to be those that generate real emotion. In another overlap with “The Knick,” Foster encourages a black laborer (McKinley Belcher III) who has an aptitude for medicine. More distinctive performances are given by Gary Cole as the hotel’s pragmatic owner, and by Norbert Leo Butz as a preening, theatrical surgeon. Radnor is not as lightweight as you might fear, but not as resonant as you might hope. John Thackery of “The Knick.”įoster, the show’s most engaging character, is played by Josh Radnor, previously known as a bumbling good guy on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” Here, Mr. It actually echoes a much better period hospital drama, Steven Soderbergh’s Cinemax series, “The Knick.” The central doctor, Jedediah Foster, is aware of European innovations and a little too fond of morphine: a dead ringer for Dr. Each character can be graded by his or her shifting ability to sympathize with those on both sides of the conflict, and the biggest moral flaw is blind devotion to either cause.īut at heart, “Mercy Street,” which counts Ridley Scott and the “E.R.” writer David Zabel among its executive producers, is a medical soap opera - “Grey’s Anatomy” with crinolines - and that’s the show’s most entertaining aspect. “Mercy Street” (the title isn’t explained until the fifth episode) tries to generate much of its dramatic force from the question of loyalty. Mary’s counterpart in the plot is Emma Green (Hannah James), a member of the family that owns the hotel, who comes to the hospital looking for a friend and ends up volunteering as a nurse because she’s upset by the inferior treatment given the Confederate patients. And the tone, a kind of perky gravity that sits well on the early-20th-century British gentry, is a more awkward fit in a story set in the midst of a war over slavery.Īlexandria is presented, apparently with some basis in fact, as a Casablanca-like free zone, a Southern city occupied by the North, where Union and Confederate, slave and free, can uneasily mingle. Its writers aren’t working at the same level when it comes to turning a phrase or developing a more than one-dimensional character. “Mercy Street” suffers in the comparison, however. This six-episode Civil War series, which will follow “Downton” on Sunday nights, beginning this weekend, also shares that British hit’s style: genteel melodrama, talky, sentimental and lightly comic, with the occasional action sequence (an escape, a bomb plot) to spice things up. “Mercy Street” may be the rare PBS drama that’s set in the United States, but don’t worry: “Downton Abbey” fans will find that it has some comfortingly familiar elements. Lavish helpings of period dresses, ball gowns and uniforms. A principled American beauty who married a European nobleman. A stately building owned by a wealthy family whose fortunes are in jeopardy.
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