Mercy (TV series)

Plot

Mercy is an ensemble drama set in the fictional Mercy Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey. The show focuses on the lives of three nurses. Veronica Flanagan Callahan (Taylor Schilling) is a nurse who has just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, while Sonia Jimenez (Jaime Lee Kirchner), her best friend, has become seriously involved with a police officer, and Chloe Payne (Michelle Trachtenberg) is a recent nursing graduate who is thrown into the world of nursing and is unprepared for what it entails.

Main cast and characters

Recurring cast and characters

Development and production

NBC producer Jim Bigwood selected the warehouse at 10 Enterprise Avenue in Secaucus, New Jersey as the filming location for the series. The show occasionally also filmed inside a private residence in Weehawken, New Jersey. The production left New Jersey for New York in 2010, however, when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie suspended the tax credits for film and television production for the fiscal year 2011 to close budget gaps.

Some interior shots for the show were filmed in the unused Barnert Hospital in Paterson, New Jersey. in the old St Mary's Hospital in Passaic Exterior shots of Mercy Hospital were taken of the back side of a public school on 4th street (between Newark Ave. and Colgate St.) in Jersey City, New Jersey. The exterior of Lucky 7's Bar was filmed at a location on the corner of 2nd and Coles Street in Jersey City. The interior of the bar was the Park Tavern located on West Side Avenue off Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City. The exterior shots of The Red Fox Saloon were filmed at the Monaghan House in South Amboy, New Jersey. The interior shots of the Saloon were filmed at Ted's Bar in the Morgan area of Sayreville, New Jersey.

Mercy was originally slated to begin midseason, but was moved to the fall after the premiere of Parenthood was pushed to 2010 due to production issues.

Critical reception

Mercy received a score of 41 of 100 from the review aggregator Metacritic, and received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Matthew Gilbert, from The Boston Globe, referred to the show as "a bunch of played-out hospital clichés" and said it "follows the hospital melodrama blueprint way too closely." Similarly, a review in The Hollywood Reporter calls the show "just another hospital soap opera" and "a lethal cocktail of virtually every medical drama ever seen on TV". Matt Roush of TV Guide wrote "Nurses deserve better than this ludicrous potboiler". Several critics have referred to Mercy as a weak copy of Showtime's Nurse Jackie.

The show's writing has been criticized as "twisting itself into a pretzel to provide ironies," and a review by Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune states that "all the characters are so thinly drawn." In a review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rob Owen said the show "hits viewers over the head with its thesis statement that nurses are under-appreciated." Robert Bianco from USA Today stated that "remarkably good actors [are] going to waste here."

On the positive side, in a review in The Daily Telegraph, Rachel Ray found the show "utterly enjoyable" and "marvelous television", while praising the "clicking pace, real-person dialogue, excellent writing, a fresh story line, and thoughtful acting". (Although the review was for a UK paper's online edition, the series did not air on British TV.) Noting an effort by NBC to find a replacement for the former standout ER, David Hinckley, from the New York Daily News, favorably compared the two shows and stated that Mercy "comes the closest yet to capturing that chemistry."