![]() ![]() “He is a cynic about human nature but an idealist when it comes to medicine,” explained the actor, best known for his work as Ted Mosby in the long-running sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” These changes are reflected in Radnor’s character, Jedediah Foster, who trained in Europe and is an early adopter of new-fangled inventions like painkillers and hypodermic needles that are viewed with skepticism by some of his peers. Burns, a collector of early medical photography and devices, gently scolds Radnor for referring to a tenaculum as a shepherd’s hook: “That’s like referring to rocket propulsion in 1862!”įor all the carnage it created, the Civil War also led to critical innovations in the world of medicine. Stanley Burns shows Radnor a complicated surgical procedure using a model abdomen. On location at the Laburnum House, a Neoclassical revival building in Richmond standing in for Alexandria’s Mansion House, the series’ medical consultant Dr. “We are held to a higher standard, and we should be,” said Hoppe, noting with pride that documentarian Burns had given the series a ringing endorsement. The network enlisted a panel of advisors, including military historian James McPherson and Anya Jabour, an expert in Southern women of the Civil War era. This being PBS, historical accuracy was of paramount importance. The hospital setting also conveniently provided a way to tell a Civil War story without having to film expensive battle sequences, which would have been exceedingly difficult on a PBS budget. “I took the gamble, because I wanted to make TV that I wanted to watch,” she said. ![]() Wolfinger was excited by the opportunity to create a series about interesting and messy women. She turned to Zabel for help marrying the medical science with the narrative drama - something he knows plenty about, having written 45 episodes of “ER” over the course of eight seasons.Īnother key inspiration was Louisa May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches,” a collection of letters the “Little Women” novelist and abolitionist wrote during her time as a Union nurse. The series was created by Wolfinger, a documentary filmmaker who originally planned to make a docudrama about Civil War medicine. This was no mere platitude: Five days earlier, nine black churchgoers had been gunned down in a racially motivated attack in Charleston, S.C., - the very city where the Civil War began - sparking a heated national debate about the Confederate flag. “The themes are completely relatable, and they’re relevant today,” said executive producer Lisa Quijano Wolfinger on the show’s set. With the end of the wildly popular “Downton Abbey” in sight, the public broadcaster is betting that the perennial fascination with this era, particularly among its viewers - Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” remains the network’s most-watched series after all - will help establish “Mercy Street” as its next marquee drama. Director Ridley Scott and former “ER” show runner David Zabel executive produce the series, which is PBS’ first original scripted drama in more than a decade. “Mercy Street’s” ensemble also includes Josh Radnor as a pioneering, morphine-addicted surgeon, McKinley Belcher as a free black man with a natural talent for medicine and Gary Cole as Emma’s entrepreneurial father, who refuses to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union. The series, which premieres Sunday on PBS, presents a fresh perspective on this great American cataclysm by focusing not on battlefields and bayonets but on the drama at a luxury hotel-turned-hospital in Union-occupied Alexandria, Va., in the early days of the war. Dubbed “‘Gone With the Wind’ meets ‘MASH’” by its creative team, “Mercy Street” is inspired by real events and, in a novel twist for a Civil War series, features two female protagonists who are volunteer nurses at the hospital - Mary Phinney, a staunch Northern abolitionist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Emma Green (Hannah James), a genteel Southern belle from a wealthy slave-owning family.
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