Critic Reviews

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.

Mercy Street sets up a story that's slow-moving but stirring, with rich depiction of the social and cultural shifts taking place across the nation. [8/15 Jan 2016, p.99]

Subplots surrounding Green’s southern belle daughters, espionage and PTSD do little to move the series along and would’ve been better shortened or left on the cutting-room floor. That said, such distractions do little to dilute Mercy Street as the imperative Civil War narrative it truly is.

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

The show can be a little disjointed or didactic, and there are many scenes of doctors confidently using techniques that viewers know to be unhelpful, a conceit that gets old relatively fast.... The more specific Mercy Street gets about individual moral, political and psychological dilemmas, and the more it gives its finest cast members scope to display the more subtle aspects of their craft, the more winning it becomes.

It would be more exciting if it took more chances. It's an earnest effort, and reminds us that all that compelling stories don't need to be told with an English accent.

It’s not so bloody to turn off viewers coming to it from lead-in “Downton Abbey,” but it’s also not so mercenary in its attempts to be compatible that it seems watered down.

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.

Overcrowded with plot, character and intent, the production has an earnest theatricality that can be both charming and tedious.

Mercy Street remains strictly middlebrow fare, but it’s well-done for what it is and better than in its first season.