Period Drama 'The Crimson Field' Begins June 21 on PBS
The six-part series tells the story of World War I’s frontline medics – their hopes, fears, triumphs and tragedies. In a tented field hospital on the coast of France, a team of doctors, nurses and women volunteers works together to heal the bodies and souls of men wounded in the trenches. The hospital is a frontier: between the battlefield and home front, but also between the old rules, hierarchies and a new way of thinking.
Game of Thrones Oona Chaplin, MI-5’s Hermoine Morris and Scott & Bailey’s Suranne Jones star as volunteer nurses who must deal daily with injuries, casualties and death. (In some ways it’s a bit like Call the Midwife but set during the Great War.) These women arrived in France in 1915, as part of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (or VADs), who were the first volunteers at the field hospitals there.
These women were responsible for staying with every dying man until the end, and it was then her responsibility to write the family of the deceased and, whether it was true or not, tell them that their loved one had died peacefully and without pain.
Watch the BBC one trailer below:
And here’s the PBS trailer, which has some additional footage, and features a slightly different tone:
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Other familiar faces you might have recognized from the trailers: Downton Abbey’s Kevin Doyle (Molesley!!!) and Little Dorrit’s Alex Wyndham.
The drama premiered on the BBC back in April of 2014, but is now finally getting its Stateside debut as part of a Sunday night British programming block on PBS that also includes the new season of popular romantic drama Last Tango in Halifax and the premiere of the splashy new Masterpiece remake of Poldark.
The Crimson Field premieres on Sunday, June 21 at 10pm on PBS stations nationwide and will air through July 26.
Thoughts? Look like something you’d watch?
