Mercy Street

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s fairly sturdy and convincingly gruesome in terms of showing a variety of battle wounds. It’s also predictable and oftentimes stilted, with the dialogue regularly preachy.

Unfortunately the storytelling lacks subtlety. The good and evil characters are too starkly one or the other. The camera tends to flag ideas or objects in advance and make points too obviously.

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.

Mercy Street hugs the middle of the road so steadfastly, it makes “Call the Midwife” look like something by David Lynch.

Mercy Street is mostly just mediocre, not awful. It’s busy enough--and has an unusual enough premise--not to be boring.... [But] The costumes get bloody; the characters stay bloodless.

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.

It's stubbornly bland, except in moments of primitive triage so graphic you may beg for mercy. [18-31 Jan 2016, p.15]

Mercy Street’s problem is an ineffable lack of cohesion and oomph. The blood is spilling, but the heart’s not pumping.