How I Met Your Mother's Josh Radnor and AnnaSophia Robb will star in PBS's Mercy Street

How I Met Your Mother's Josh Radnor, The Carrie Diaries star AnnaSophia Robb and Mary Elizabeth Winstead will travel back to the American Civil War for Sir Ridley Scott and The Good Wife producer David W Zucker's drama series Mercy Street.

PBS's first American drama series in over a decade will be based on real events at Virginia's Mansion House Hospital, where both sides of the Civil War converged under one roof.

Winstead has been cast as a New England nurse named Mary Phinney who is the newest member of the Mansion House staff, while Hannah James will play a Confederate nurse who has to work alongside Phinney.

Other residents of the hospital will be wealthy civilian surgeon Jedediah Foster (Radnor), hospital patriarch James Green (Gary Cole), the Union Army's superintendent nurse Dorothea Dix (Cherry Jones) and a suave veteran surgeon named Dr Byron Hale (Norbert Leo Butz).

The large ensemble cast for Mercy Street also includes Peter Gerety (The Wire), McKinley Belcher III (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Shalita Grant (NCIS: New Orleans), Jack Falahee (How to Get Away with Murder) and Cameron Monaghan (Shameless).

Mercy Street will be airing its six episodes on PBS in the winter of 2016 as part of the channel's Sunday night lineup.

The final series of UK period drama Downton Abbey will also be airing on Sunday evenings on PBS early next year.

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