By DCist contributor Orrin Konheim
As LeBron James told us in Trainwreck, anyone who’s anyone in the Cavaliers locker room and beyond is watching Downton Abbey. The esteemed period piece gave PBS an entry point into television’s Golden Age, but a slight critical dip in later seasons combined with the fact that the show is going off the air next year means it’s time for PBS to introduce a follow-up if it wants to stay relevant.
PBS is hoping that Mercy Street will come to the rescue. The Civil War-era hospital drama is, what multiple publicists were quick to remind me, the first American-produced drama for the network in over a decade. To promote the event, PBS packed the house at the Newseum’s Annenberg Theater on Wednesday night for a screening and Q&A with members of the cast and chief creative talent.
The series was conceived by executive producer Lisa Wolfinger, who is a prominent name in historical documentaries. As a result, the show has the feel of a PBS docudrama. “I was looking for a way to tell a Civil War story from a fresh vantage point after the sesquicentennial,” Wolfinger said. “I realized there was a great story about the medical side of the Civil War, about the doctors and nurses.”
Set in Alexandria, the show centers on two volunteer nurses (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and newcomer Hannah James) on opposite sides of the conflict and includes an array of characters from all races and political leanings in what the producers felt was the Civil War’s ultimate geopolitical hotspot. The show is set in a family mansion that was converted to an occupied Union hospital, and many of the characters and locations are based on historical fact.
Along with Remember the Titans, this marks Alexandria’s second turn in the Hollywood spotlight in the 2000s, though Mercy Street should have more potential to affect the city’s history-centered tourism industry.
“There’s a lot of history that’s still available today in Alexandria and we’re really excited,” said Alexandria Black History Museum director Audrey Davis who consulted on the film.
The town also plans to aggressively promote the show. “Visit Alexandria is a national sponsor of the series, so that before and after each episode viewers will see a message inviting people to come to Alexandria to learn more,” says Patricia Washington, president and CEO of Visit Alexandria. They are forecasting a 10 percent increase in tourism, or 330,00 extra visits, as result, she said.
Among those present at the screening of the first episode Wednesday were Winstead (Sky High, The Returned), James, Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) and Tara Summers (Boston Legal, Damages). For Winstead, this marks her second turn as a Civil War figure after playing Mary Todd Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (fortunately, this series aims for a higher level of historical accuracy).
Also on hand was director Roxann Dawson, who is best-known for playing a half-Klingon engineer on Star Trek: Voyager in the ’90s (she confided in a one-on-one interview that she does not presently speak Klingon), and has racked a plethora of TV directing credits in the past two decades.
But Star Trek fans and those coming to see Radnor in person were well outnumbered by devotees of Ken Burns, who moderated the event.
Sporting a tweed jacket, jeans, and his signature shaggy haircut, Burns has served as a stand-in for the one professor in every college history department who could make learning about the past cool since his The Civil War miniseries aired 25 years ago.
“You’re all such beautiful people but I didn’t think I’d ever have the opportunity to stand in front of Ken Burns,” elementary school art teacher Katie Rasmussen said during the question and answer session. She told Burns that The Civil War was the only soundtrack she has on her smartphone playlist and later explained backstage that she grew up with a dad who was a history teacher; she grew up watching Burns’ miniseries on repeat.
Another audience member took the mike just to thank Burns for inspiring him in part to become a Civil War reenactor.
Another person asked how the series would have changed if it were produced in the present day. Burns replied that the historical perspective is mostly unchanged, except it is now believed that the death toll was 25 percent higher. In other words, The Civil War would have been even sadder.
For his part, Josh Radnor provided the most laughs while impressing an audience who might not be aware of his background as an acclaimed writer, director, and Broadway actor.
In addition to disclosing that his favorite thing about the part of Dr. Jedediah Foster was the opportunity to sport unironic facial hair, he also opined on wanting to go beyond the stanard sitcom role: “I feel that a lot of storytelling in Hollywood is incredibly reductive in terms of types of people. You read something and you think ‘Ok, that guy wants to have sex, that’s all he thinks about’ and my experience of being a person on the planet is things are more complex.”
While the show moves slower than expected in full-episode form, the screening helped entice the audience by stripping down the first three episodes to their juiciest clips including a stolen kiss between a nurse (James) and her future husband, another nurse (Summers) advising her lover to rebel against those who wronged him, and a scene of Radnor’s character arguing for the life of his Confederate brother. There’s a definite ambition for the show to be a sepia-toned version of the next Scandal.
Of course, the big question is whether it can be a worthy successor to Downton Abbey.
“We love Downton Abbey. We love it so much we even visited High Clair Castle,” said Falls Church resident Jack Williams, who attended the event with his wife in hopes of finding out if Mercy Street was of a similar quality. “It’s hard to top Downton Abbey, but I won’t reserve judgement.”
The show will debut on PBS on January 17th at 10 p.m.
