The cast of Downton Abbey. Promotional poster.

Downton Abbey, the award-garlanded ITV television series by Julian Fellowes, is now as familiar and comforting as a cup of Horlicks before bed.

Set in the years around the first World War, the fantastically popular Downton Abbey ticks all the boxes for period drama fanatics: It concerns the upstairs lives and loves of the family of the (fictional) Earl of Grantham, as well the below stairs lives and loves of his multidinious staff. Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) has a brood of beautiful daughters, Ladies Mary, Sybil, and Edith, who need marrying off; a distant cousin as an heir, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens); an American wife whose wealth saved his estate; and Maggie Smith as his uber-snobbish mother, the Dowager Countess of Grantham. The household of servants includes a butler who was once a clown, a Communist chauffeur, a feisty maid, a slightly wet skivvy, and a nearly-blind cook called Mrs Patmore.

It’s been going for two series now (the second is about to finish) and has been earning regular audiences of 9 million viewers, rising to 11.5 million once “consolidated” viewing – ie on the Internet – is taken into account. But where the first series won plaudits all over the place, the second has fallen victim to the dreaded sophomore slump and been accused of having an over-complicated plot.
Even so, it’s still pulling in the viewers and now the makers have announced that there will be a third series, set in the 1920s, to be broadcast in September 2012. Commentators are mostly worried that the series has, in TV parlance, “jumped the shark” (referring to an episode of Happy Days where the Fonz jumped over a shark, marking the show’s decline); but they are still jubilant about its return.
ITV has also accidentally revealed which character will die in the final episode of series two (to be shown this Sunday) in a Spanish flu epidemic – by releasing a cast list for the next series of the show (The Telegraph and other reports are declining to say who wouldn’t make it).
“It’s rare to find a drama that the audience connects with so strongly and we’re extremely proud to have commissioned a series that has become such a phenomenon,” said Laura Mackie, ITV’s Director of Drama Commissioning, quoted on Entertainmentwise.
Julian Fellowes added, also on Entertainmentwise: “I am extremely grateful to ITV for this. I have grown very fond of my Downton family and I certainly do not want to say goodbye to them quite yet.”
Doomed cakes! Viv Groskop, in her Guardian blog, said that she still remains “loyal to the show”, despite “recent disappointments”. The dialogue is ridiculously “expositional”, with practically every character having to say “‘I feel that the war has somehow changed me.’” Groskop likes the ice-cold Lady Mary, though, and particularly enjoys cook Mrs Patmore making cakes with skivvy Daisy, suggesting there should be a spin-off series: “Daisy and Mrs Patmore Make Doomed Cakes.”
Everyone’s doomed! Glenda Cooper, in a piece in The Daily Telegraph, lamenting the second series’ qualities (or lack of), said that the television idiom “jumping the shark” applies very well to Downton Abbey. For Cooper, it happened when somebody pretending to be the heir to Downton (thought drowned on the Titanic) showed up – she was just surprised that Patrick didn’t “turn up with a literal shark under his arm as proof for the sceptical Lady Mary that he had indeed struggled in the icy waters of the Atlantic.” “Coronets and entails? Forget it. It’ll be all carnage and entrails from now on.”

But it’s still going to be fun! Media Monkey at The Guardian was rejoicing at the news: “No other show on UK TV currently delivers so consistently when it comes to unintentionally hilarious plot twists.”


For some lovely expositional dialogue, watch this clip:



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