Downton Abbey

February 10, 2012
Reviewed by Marc Glassman

Downton Abbey
Julian Fellowes, creator & key writer
Brian Percival, Andy Goddard & four others, directors
Starring: Hugh Bonneville (Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham), Elizabeth McGovern (Cora Crawley, Lady Grantham), Maggie Smith (Dowager Countess Grantham), Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary Crawley), Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley), Penelope Wilton (Isobel Crawley), Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith Crawley), Jessica Brown-Findlay (Lady Sybil Crawley), Jim Carter (Charles Carson, Butler), Phyllis Logan (Elsie Hughes), Brendan Coyle (John Bates), Siobhan Finneran (Sarah O’Brien), Rob James-Collier (Thomas), Thomas Howes (William), Sophie McShera (Daisy), Allen Leach (Tom Branson), Zoe Boyle (Lavinia), Theo James (Kemal Pamuk)

The hype
Since its first broadcast on England’s ITV network in the fall of 2010, Downton Abbey has been a huge ratings and critical success. A year after its debut, the series was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the most critically acclaimed English-language show” of 2011, beating out Mad Men. The show has gone on to garner multiple Primetime Emmy Awards and the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. Over 100 countries have the rights to broadcast the show.

The second season has now been released on DVD and Blu-ray in Canada by EOne in a marketing trend that will be followed from continent to continent over the next few months.

The genres
Costume drama; the 21st century Upstairs, Downstairs; romantic comedy; family melodrama

The conception and plot
Positively Dickensian with more than a smidgen of Austen and Thackeray thrown in to the conceptual stew, Downton Abbey is a marvelously complex tale about the lives led by the aristocratic Crawley-Grantham family and their servants during the early part of the 20th century.

As in the classic British TV series Upstairs Downstairs, the audience is offered stories about the servants as well as the titled lords and ladies of the manor.

Upstairs, Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham is confronted with the question of who will inherit his land and fortune after the Titanic goes down, killing the only two obvious candidates. Enter third cousins Matthew Crawley and his mother Isobel, who have to learn how to adjust from their upper middle class backgrounds to the expectation of becoming landed gentry.

Naturally, Robert Crawley’s family—his American heiress wife Cora, mother, the Dowager Countess and daughters Mary, Edith and Sybil have to adjust, too—and not just to their “poor” cousins. World War One happens soon after (at the end of the first season) while the family—in particular Cora and her mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess---tries to sort out how to hold onto some of their fortune for the daughters.

Downstairs, there’s romantic intrigue involving the mysterious and infirm Bates (one bad leg) and servant Anna as well as rivalry between footmen and valets Thomas and William as they compete for the affection of servant Daisy. Looming large in the tales among the servants are the presences of butler Carson and head household mistress Mrs. Hughes, who have dedicated their lives to Downton Abbey.

The performances
This is classic British television so it’s no surprise that the cast is impeccable. The one obvious standout is Maggie Smith, who is wonderfully amusing as the fearsome Dowager Countess but the series is attracting fans for most of the leads especially the beautiful Michelle Dockery who plays Mary and the quietly charismatic Brendan Coyle as Bates.

The skinny
Downton Abbey really began to hook me—and many others—when the previously priggish Mary took a Turkish lover in Episode Three of the First Season—and he proceeded to die of a heart attack while in her bed. One realized: this isn’t just Upstairs Downstairs after all. The show hasn’t shirked from showing homosexuality, death, suicide and gruesome injuries.

The creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, is the Baron of West Stafford as well as an accomplished writer and actor. He knows this dramatic terrain and has already won an Oscar for scripting Robert Altman’s acclaimed drama Gosford Park.

In Downton Abbey, Fellowes offers us a nuanced account of declining aristocratic life in England during the first quarter of the 20th century. He shows the underbelly of that life but also revels in the codes amongst the gentry and their servants that were still artfully understood and practiced by both sides during that period. This is a significant TV series, as important as The Wire or The Sopranos. It fully deserves its worldwide audience.