Ridley Scott, photo provided by PBS
Pushing into original drama the wake of “Downton Abbey’s” outsized ratings, PBS today announced it has ordered an original fact-based Civil War drama fro Ridley Scott.
Six episodes are to debut in winter 2016, a “unique blend of hospital drama and family saga.”
The drama follows two volunteer nurses on opposite sides of the Civil War and sounds like a mashup of genres, sort of “Call the Midwife” meets “The Knick” meets Ken Burns:
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.
The series, to be set and filmed in Virginia (thanks to a grant from the Virginia Film Board), will be executive produced by Ridley Scott (“Gladiator,” “Thelma & Louise”), David W. Zucker (“The Good Wife”) and Lisa Q. Wolfinger (“Desperate Crossing”), and written by David Zabel (“ER”).
