![]() The interview should be a breeze, but alas it is not. Now Dix, a formidable reformer and organizer, has been charged with recruiting thousands of women to handle the staggering number of wounded and diseased. The sheer level of carnage has already upended what was, before the war, an all-male nursing profession. It is 1862 and the war both sides thought would be short and sweet is proving to be anything but. ![]() Nursing Corps, Dorothea Dix (Cherry Jones). The series opens with young Yankee widow Mary Phinney (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) presenting herself to the head of the U.S. Right from the get-go, Mercy Street established itself as a show where the war of ideas was not too far removed from the war of munitions. That it did, just days after the second season finale aired, six weeks into a new presidency and five months before Charlottesville. Sloan Foundation that was principally responsible for putting the show on the air, and what the Sloan giveth, the Sloan could taketh away. Sadly, it was not the Lord but the Alfred P. The fact that Mercy Street debuted in the midst of a racially charged, factually-challenged political campaign seemed almost providential. To me, the show was an absorbing counter-narrative of African-Americans participating in their own liberation and proclaiming their emancipation long before Abraham Lincoln did. To many longtime PBS viewers, Mercy Street felt like a mashup of familiar TV genres with Downton Abbey aspirations, all period wardrobe and old-timey dialogue, with a few bickering doctors thrown in. Through compelling characters and storylines, the writers of Mercy Street not only reminded us that slavery was the reason for the Civil War, but showed how slaves contributed mightily - I would argue crucially - to eventual Union victory. Mercy Street was a rare drama that tried to interweave story and history, putting its characters through wrenching, transformative change while the country did likewise.ĭuring the Civil War, no change was more momentous than the destruction of the chattel slavery system. Set at a Virginia mansion captured by the Union Army a few miles from the White House, Mercy Street was praised for its historical authenticity, and not just in its bloody surgical re-enactments. Brought to life in 2016, only to be cruelly snuffed out one year later, this PBS series was presented to viewers as a fact-based historical drama set at a makeshift army hospital during the Civil War. The further away we get from Mercy Street, the more obvious what a brave and solitary show it was.
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