An Exercise In Nonsense

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I am greatly enjoying this series. The production has the feel of the period from the mud in the streets, to the period decor of the rooms and costumes, all the way to the amputated limbs being taken away in a wheelbarrow. War is hell, and none was more so than the Civil War, when weaponry had become so efficient as to mow down regiments marching forward in outdated styles of battle. Some viewers might object to bloody surgery scenes. However, one of the most affecting scenes to me was of a Confederate soldier with shell shock who told of the horror of battle, "the smoke and blood and the screaming, you never know where it's coming from." Soldiers who make it to this hospital are cared for to the best of their abilities by Mary Phinney and Dr. Jedediah Foster, played admirably by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Josh Radnor. Their own personal dramas are interwoven into the story lines quite well. Applause to the producers and directors!

We all know that the Civil War was horrendous and men suffered gruesome wounds. But the explicit and extreme blood and butchery seem like gratuitous fillers for a bad script.I was really looking forward to this show because of the high quality of most period dramas on PBS, but this one is terrible. The costumes are good but some things for this period are just very unrealistic. A head nurse being told she must sleep on the floor, really? Also, the way some of the characters are portrayed they are just all over the map. This show just seems to be a re-hash of other civil war shows, again this goes to a bad script. This is no where near the quality of Luther, Sherlock or Downton Abby. Hollywood can't rest on it's laurels if it want's to compete.

I watched the first episode as I'm always interested in a new costume drama, but I found this show to be really crippled by stock, predictable characters, so many of them just plain mean with no sense of reality about it. I decided to hold out through another episode, and while, again, the production values are good and there are some actors and actresses that I generally like, the script and the character development (or lack thereof) has made this unwatchable for me.The worst thing is that I keep reading such good reviews. What are people watching? If I wanted some Lifetime movie from two decades ago, this might be fine, but to tout this as the next Downton Abbey (where characters have nuances), is absurd!

Ridley Scott this may be, but a British costume drama it is not. By which I mean, though they appear to have tried for four years, they could not come up with a script that was not lame, or actors who were not amateurish. The very MINIMUM that should be expected is that actors will have a reasonable and consistent accent for their characters, but apparently even this was too much to ask--for example, each of the actors playing the family who own the hotel-turned hospital has a different accent, even though they are supposed to be playing a single Virginia family. The older girl, one of our heroines, cannot even maintain a consistent accent throughout,sometimes sounding vaguely southernish, and other times like a Yankee. Her younger sister by contrast sounds like a Georgia cracker. The results are like a low-budget film from the 1950s. Really really disappointing and cheesy. No finesse in the writing either--just clump clump clump like a big pair of boots. Ugh.