This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
For nine years, America watched Josh Radnor as a man looking for love — looking for a wife — in the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother."
He returns to television on Sunday as a morphine-addicted doctor working in a Union Army hospital in the PBS Civil War drama "Mercy Street."
"I didn't have a overarching agenda about what I wanted to do next, other than finding great material," Radnor said. "And this certainly qualified."
Radnor insisted he had a "weird moment" three days before he received the "Mercy Street" script when he thought, "I'd like to do something where I get to have an un-ironic mustache. And I was thinking of, like, a '70s cop show or something.
"And then I got 'Mercy Street' and I said, 'No, this is un-ironic and requires facial hair.' But I just read the script, and the part was so compelling, the story was so compelling, it just gave off an air. ... There was a kind of class to it and grace, and it was so beautifully done."
He stars as Jedediah Foster, the civilian surgeon who grew up in a family of privileged slave-owners in Maryland. And Radnor admitted the role "scared me a little bit."
"As wonderful, truly, as 'How I Met Your Mother' was for so long, you're only asked to play a certain couple notes," Radnor said. "And you kind of forget you have all these. So this was scary enough and exciting enough for me to want to jump in and see what I could do with it."
As for that morphine addiction, that's historically accurate, according to executive producer David Zabel ("ER"). Doctors of the era were experimenting with the best ways to use the new drug, and injecting it with a hypodermic needle was a new process — one that doctors tried on themselves.
"There were numerous examples of real doctors who became addicted because they were using themselves and their colleagues to try to gauge what was the most efficient way to deliver the drugs," Zabel said.
The morphine addiction "doesn't go well," Radnor deadpanned. "It's not, like, one of the good morphine addiction stories. It's more of, like, a negative one of those."
His is just one of many stories in the six-episode "Mercy Street," a Civil War drama that's not about fighting or battles — it's about the aftermath, and the ongoing conflict between the North and the South.
The series is set in 1862 Alexandria, Va., a Confederate town occupied by the Northern army soon after the fighting began and held by the North throughout the war. The story centers on a military hospital housed in a hotel owned by a Southern family who remained in Alexandria.
"We just thought, 'Wow, let's do something set in the Civil War from the vantage point of these doctors and volunteer nurses,' because it's never been done," executive producer Lisa Wolfinger said. "And what a fantastic lens — a new way into the Civil War to tell an old story."
It gave the writers a way to "tell all the sides of the story that we were trying to get to," Zabel said. "So this story is neither a Southern story nor a Northern story. It's really an American story."
According to Wolfinger, about 75 percent of the characters in "Mercy Street" are based on real people, but viewers will recognize very few names.
"They're not necessarily iconic characters, which actually gave us some freedom," she said. "It was kind of exciting to portray real characters that nobody has ever heard of, so it gave us a little bit of freedom."
There are a few familiar names. Medical activist Dorothea Dix (Cherry Jones) appears in Episode 1. And the Lincolns visit in Episode 6, although they are "sort of offstage, largely," Zabel said.
Characters like Mary Phinney (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a nurse who's a New England abolitionist, are pivotal to the plot.
The real Phinney wrote a memoir about her time working in the hospital that formed the basis for "Mercy Street."
"I was shooting this at the same time as I was discovering things about her," Winstead said. "And it was kind of a wonderful, special thing to be a part of and to bring to life. … I very much saw her as a friend as I was reading this and performing as her."
"Mercy Street" was filmed on location in Virginia, using buildings that still stand a century-and-a-half after the end of the Civil War. The series employed a panel of historians to ensure accuracy, but the characters are fictionalized and, in some cases, they are composites of multiple real-life people.
The cast includes McKinley Belcher III, Suanne Bertish, Norbert Leo Butz, L. Scott Caldwell, Gary Cole, Jack Falahee, Peter Gerety, Shalita Grant, Hannah James, Luke Macfarlane, Cameron Monaghan, Donna Murphy, Anna Sophia Robb, Tara Summers and Wade Williams.
"Mercy Street" tackles the very big issues of the time, including slavery. But it's more than a historical treatise — it's a family saga, a medical drama and a character drama that includes romance and humor.
"I spent years doing the show 'ER,' and we were trying to get some of that kind of vibe of the cross-section of all these people bouncing against each other and these stories crossing each other," said Zabel, who was the showrunner on that long-running series and wrote 45 episodes. "And that brings an adrenaline and an energy to the series."
PBS is hoping that fans of "Downton Abbey" will watch the latest episode of that serialized show on Sunday, then stay tuned for the premiere of "Mercy Street."
"It was exciting to take on a Civil War story that wasn't about battles, that wasn't about generals," said executive producer David W. Zucker ("The Good Wife"). "And while our characters are still historically drawn, we were telling, in some way, a far more relatable story."
Twitter: @ScottDPierce —
On TV
The Civil War drama "Mercy Street" premieres Sunday, Jan. 17, at 9 p.m. on PBS/Ch. 7.