Mercy Street

The script occasionally wanders into “Gone With the Wind”-style melodrama, but is always rescued by excellent performances. Among the best of the bunch are James, Radnor and Winstead. Butz and Summers edge delightfully close to comic relief.

If you can get past the sermonizing, there maybe a story worth seeing here.

Mercy Street delivers on gross-out medicine, tentatively soapy romance and and even occasionally nuanced history lessons and keeps the giggle-inducing performances to a relatively minimum. Six episodes was probably a less-than-ideal count for Lisa Wolfinger and David Zabel's drama, but the run concludes at a place that should take the show interesting places in a hypothetically better arced second season.

Trying to do justice to the stories of abolitionists, freed slaves, Confederate sympathizers, wounded warriors, their harried healers, and history itself is probably a too-tall order for the six episodes PBS envisions as a first season. The series, though, isn't afraid to be entertaining, and it shouldn't have to be.

Its writers aren’t working at the same level [as Downton Abbey] when it comes to turning a phrase or developing a more than one-dimensional character. 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.

The cast in fact is terrific. (It also includes Norbert Leo Butz, Peter Gerety and AnnaSophia Robb.) A cramped, airless setting is the critical flaw here. Nothing comes to life--words, drama or most of all, characters.

The characters are one-dimensional, so that you essentially know who they are within a minute or less, not least of all the spoiled-belle Confederate volunteer Emma Green (Hannah James), who’s straight outta “Gone With the Wind.” And the story lines about patients are didactic, there simply to provide the writers with EZ-to-read lessons about race, war, and medical progress.