MERCY STREET (LATE NIGHT MINI-RANT)

So I started watching this new PBS series set in historic Alexandria, Virginia, at the beginning of The Civil War, because a friend of mine is in it. But, after several episodes, it's become almost painful to watch, despite some great acting and great set and costume production.

In 2016, MERCY STREET projects the same bend-over-backward-to-placate-the-losers-who-deserved-to-lose, spare-the-South's-feelings anti-history that has overwhelmed movies and TV shows set during The Civil War or its aftermath (see almost every classic Hollywood Western) in which the Southerners are mostly noble, kind to their slaves/servants, honorable and just, while many of the Northerners are often brutish, violent and seemingly more racist than the Southerners.

Can you believe that in 2016 in a Civil War drama series (on PBS no less) the only attempted lynching so far is of a free black man by Union soldiers, the only rape of a black woman by a brutal oaf is by an employee of the Union Army, the most clueless, hypocritical and ignoble, dishonorable, nasty, violent, and even psychopathic characters are Union soldiers and/or Northerners.

MERCY STREET is heartbreakingly as ahistorical, misleading, misinformed and deceitful as any rightwing propaganda propagated by apologists for the Confederacy, including the KKK. Why no one is objecting to this and to the producers and to PBS I don't know, but I am.