Mercy: The Complete Series

In the TV world of tough-as-nails nurses with screwed-up private lives, Veronica Callahan (Taylor Schilling) is in a class by herself as a short-fuse veteran who's returned from service in Iraq with unresolved issues, including PTSD, potential alcoholism (which is already ruling her parents' lives), a marriage on the rocks, and a battlefield affair that follows her home when Dr. Chris Sands (James Tupper) takes a job at the New Jersey municipal hospital where she works. Veronica's solution is to ignore the problems and bulldoze through the day-to-day emergencies with an attitude that would get her bounced from any real-life medical facility—even before she tosses a cinderblock through the windshield of the car owned by the obnoxious Dr. Dan Harris (James LeGros). Cancelled after one season, Mercy plays like a dysfunctional ER from the perspective of the nursing staff—notably Veronica's commitment-phobic best friend Sonia (Jaime Lee Kirchner), and gifted and bubbly young trainee Chloe (Michelle Trachtenberg). Loaded with dire cases, unanticipated catastrophes (Veronica gets buried in a collapsed building!), and plenty of melodrama, romantic and otherwise, it's more interesting and dynamic than TNT's similarly-themed Hawthorne; but in the end, it's still simply a medical soap opera, one which concludes with multiple cliffhangers never to be resolved. Compiling all 22 episodes from the 2009–10 sole season, DVD extras include audio commentary on two episodes, an extended “director's cut” of the finale, and interview featurettes with the cast and guest stars. Optional. (S. Axmaker)