PBS has announced it will make a 6-episode Civil War drama that will premiere a year from now.
Behind the scenes the show’s team includes executive producers “Ridley Scott (‘Gladiator’ and ‘Thelma & Louise’), David W. Zucker (‘The Good Wife’) and Lisa Q. Wolfinger (‘Desperate Crossing, The untold story of the Mayflower’)” and writer David Zabel (“ER”).
So what will the yet-to-be-titled series be about? According to the PBS press release, it will be “Based on true stories [which follow] two volunteer nurses on opposite sides of the Civil War. Mary Phinney, a staunch New England abolitionist, and Emma Green, a willful young Confederate belle, collide at Mansion House, the Green family’s luxury hotel that has been taken over and transformed into a Union Army Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, the longest-occupied Confederate city of the war. As the boundaries of medicine are being explored and expanded, the role of women is also broadening. Here, in the collision of a wartime medical drama and a family saga of conflicted loyalties and moral dilemmas, the series plays out a story of the highest stakes.”
It is expected that the first six episodes will be the beginning of a series that will last multiple years.
I’m not holding my breath for this one. Looks like a really weak and scripted story. I’d rather see a factual account of the war and not the ” drama ” based on supposed stories. I’d rather see what Scott did with Gladiator applied to the real war – Antietam, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg and the supression of the REBELLION of the Southern Confederacy, not the ever popular slave issue. But this is only my opinion.