PBS hit 'Downton Abbey,' which details the lives of British aristocrats and their servants on the eve of World War I, returns for Season 2 on Sunday.
By Nick Brigg for ITV/Masterpiece
Praise the lord of the manor and pass the smelling salts: Downton Abbey is on its way back to PBS.
No doubt millions of Americans who keep up with the Kardashians are scratching their heads and thinking, "Downtown what?"
But attention must be paid. Season 1 of the critically acclaimed Masterpiece Classic period drama attracted 5 million viewers to each new episode, big for PBS and highest for Masterpiece in years. It won six Emmys last year and is nominated for four Golden Globes this year (to be awarded Jan. 15).
It was a much-viewed series online and a much-discussed topic in social media.
And for the next seven weeks starting Sunday (9 ET/PT, times may vary), American Anglophiles will again obsess over the upstairs and downstairs of a grand English castle and the ups and downs of an aristocratic culture about to be blown apart by World War I. So what if America never had a ruling class of titled lords? Who cares if domestic servants in America never much resembled their British counterparts?
"It's just a damn good story," says Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of Masterpiece (which just celebrated its 40th anniversary) and the woman largely responsible for bringing Abbey and scores of other high-gloss, high-culture British series to U.S. public television. "That is what people are responding to — it's so beautifully done. They're fascinated with the Englishness of it."
What seems to matter to fans is the story of these aristocrats and servants, with a narrative as addictive as any soap opera — created, written and produced by Julian Fellowes, aka Baron Fellowes, 62, a late product of this lost world himself.
"What makes it popular is we treat all the characters the same. We don't suggest that the 'upstairs' people are more important than the 'downstairs' people," says Fellowes (who won an Oscar for his Gosford Park screenplay in 2001). "That was a decision that turned out to be right for the zeitgeist now."
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic agree Abbey is a pleasure without guilt. The show is produced for British commercial channel ITV by Carnival Film & Television (a division of NBC Universal), with PBS' Masterpiece as co-producer. Its production values are rich, its settings authentic, its period costumes sumptuous and its acting sterling.
But what keeps viewers coming back are the plot points, as Season 2 begins two years into World War I:
Will reluctant heir Matthew Crawley wed Lady Mary and save the estate? Will American-born Cora, Countess of Grantham (glowing Elizabeth McGovern), go to war with her mother-in-law, arrogantly clueless dowager countess Violet (glowering Maggie Smith)? Will the Earl of Grantham's valet Mr. Bates find a way to be with head housemaid Anna? Will Carson the butler survive the looming changes he fears even more than his master? Will the upstairs men and the downstairs men survive the trenches of war-torn France, even as centuries-old class distinctions are blurred or erased?
'People like it in similar ways'
Naturally, the English themselves adore Abbey, which attracted 9 million viewers the night the second season premiered in the U.K. in September.
But attention must be paid. Season 1 of the critically acclaimed Masterpiece Classic period drama attracted 5 million viewers to each new episode, big for PBS and highest for Masterpiece in years. It won six Emmys last year and is nominated for four Golden Globes this year (to be awarded Jan. 15).
It was a much-viewed series online and a much-discussed topic in social media.
And for the next seven weeks starting Sunday (9 ET/PT, times may vary), American Anglophiles will again obsess over the upstairs and downstairs of a grand English castle and the ups and downs of an aristocratic culture about to be blown apart by World War I. So what if America never had a ruling class of titled lords? Who cares if domestic servants in America never much resembled their British counterparts?
"It's just a damn good story," says Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of Masterpiece (which just celebrated its 40th anniversary) and the woman largely responsible for bringing Abbey and scores of other high-gloss, high-culture British series to U.S. public television. "That is what people are responding to — it's so beautifully done. They're fascinated with the Englishness of it."
What seems to matter to fans is the story of these aristocrats and servants, with a narrative as addictive as any soap opera — created, written and produced by Julian Fellowes, aka Baron Fellowes, 62, a late product of this lost world himself.
"What makes it popular is we treat all the characters the same. We don't suggest that the 'upstairs' people are more important than the 'downstairs' people," says Fellowes (who won an Oscar for his Gosford Park screenplay in 2001). "That was a decision that turned out to be right for the zeitgeist now."
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic agree Abbey is a pleasure without guilt. The show is produced for British commercial channel ITV by Carnival Film & Television (a division of NBC Universal), with PBS' Masterpiece as co-producer. Its production values are rich, its settings authentic, its period costumes sumptuous and its acting sterling.
But what keeps viewers coming back are the plot points, as Season 2 begins two years into World War I:
Will reluctant heir Matthew Crawley wed Lady Mary and save the estate? Will American-born Cora, Countess of Grantham (glowing Elizabeth McGovern), go to war with her mother-in-law, arrogantly clueless dowager countess Violet (glowering Maggie Smith)? Will the Earl of Grantham's valet Mr. Bates find a way to be with head housemaid Anna? Will Carson the butler survive the looming changes he fears even more than his master? Will the upstairs men and the downstairs men survive the trenches of war-torn France, even as centuries-old class distinctions are blurred or erased?
'People like it in similar ways'
Naturally, the English themselves adore Abbey, which attracted 9 million viewers the night the second season premiered in the U.K. in September.
McGovern, one of a handful of American actors who live and work in the U.K. (she moved there nearly 20 years ago after marrying British producer Simon Curtis), understands the British and American responses to the series.
"People like it in similar ways. They get really caught up in it. It's a peaceful escape but not boring," she says. "In America, there's an added frisson because the people who know about it feel like they've discovered it. There's an added passion that you have when you feel you own something that's only yours. (In London), Downton Abbey is in the papers all the time; people refer to something as 'very Downton Abbey' and everyone knows what you're talking about."
We've become hooked on imported intrigue before: with TheJewel in the Crown (1984), about the final days of British rule in India; with I, Claudius (1976), about decadence and murder in the first century of the Roman Empire; with Brideshead Revisited (1981), the adaption of Evelyn Waugh's novel about dissolute-but-charming aristocrats (which aired on PBS, though not Masterpiece); and with the original Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), from which descends the PBS infatuation with British stories about the titled and their servants. (The updated Upstairs Downstairs, which aired in April on Masterpiece, returns next winter.)
Abbey will be back for a third season, thanks to the popularity and acclaim. With about 1 million more watching online, mostly younger women, overall it has become the third-most-viewed Masterpiece since 1990. (No. 1 was The Buccaneers in 1995; No. 2, Prime Suspect II in 1993.) Its Emmys include best miniseries, supporting actress (Smith) and writing (Fellowes).
The hoopla over Season 2 has been building. About 50 stations around the country have had or are planning events to celebrate, everything from teas to a screening at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Mo., to 10-minute previews on PBS' Facebook page. Besides stepped-up conventional advertising, PBS also is using Twitter to promote the show, and some of the actors have been tweeting about it in the U.K.
Books have 'Abbey' covered
Publishers have been busy, too, with at least three Abbey-related books out, including a lavishly illustrated companion book, The World of Downton Abbey by British journalist Jessica Fellowes (niece of Julian).
Julian Fellowes says English country estates are a valuable part of the British national heritage, a conviction that underlies Abbey.
"The English country house was an interdependent community, for many centuries the hub of provincial life," he says. "You can still find it, much changed now. Everyone (who works or lives there) calls each other by first names. But you'll find representatives of every level of British society all pulling together to make the thing work."
As viewers of the first season know, Downton Abbey is "entailed" to a male heir only, to ensure that the estate remains intact over generations. If the Earl of Grantham has no son, the closest male relative gets everything — land, title and castle.
That is a concept alien to Americans, and increasingly even to the British, who have recently changed their laws so that a first-born female child will be able to inherit the British throne even if her parents later have a boy.
But the entail is Abbey's necessary plot driver. Lord Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), the current earl, married a rich American, Cora, to help finance the running of the estate (not uncommon in the 19th and early 20th centuries), but they have only three daughters.
So everything, including Cora's money, will go to the new heir (the first one having died on the Titanic), middle-class lawyer Matthew (Dan Stevens), who is so distant a relative that he is a stranger to the family.
Amazingly, Cora doesn't seem very angry about it, and McGovern says she's sometimes a little annoyed for her. She "gave up her country, her past, her fortune, and at some point she has to look at her husband and wonder, 'Was it worth it?' "
Still, McGovern enjoys playing the old-fashioned ideal of female strength. Cora is "unbelievably strong without personifying the postmodern idea of a strong woman," she says. "She conciliates to her husband's needs, as a woman in her position would do, but underneath is a will of iron, an incredibly strong, flexible person."
It's just such a character, plus the setting, that makes this genre so enduring, Eaton says. "It's a novel, it's social history, it's a love story with tremendous eye candy. It's almost a byproduct that you're learning social history and understanding a period you might know nothing about."
In the U.K., some historians take issue with the details. The show fails to convey the reality of hard, dirty lives of most domestic servants, says Lucy Delap, a Cambridge historian and author of Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain.
"The nub of my problem with Downton Abbey is that we don't really understand the mentality of those people, how a woman could have her hair dressed every night by a ladies' maid and not even know her real name," Delap says. "It's important if through historical drama we want to understand the past, the ugliness and the distance of the past, instead of saying, 'They're just like us,' when they weren't." But, she says, Abbey is still very good TV. "I don't expect TV to depict the actual reality, because that would not make very good TV. They always have to dramatize and over-egg in order to entertain."
When the series first aired in Britain in 2010, fans had fun arguing about whether some words and phrases in the dialogue were anachronistic, or catching errors in the outdoor scenes (shot mostly in an Oxfordshire village) such as a TV antenna, a modern street sign or double yellow lines on a road.
Fellowes says he used to get upset about the nitpicking, but not anymore. "I realized the papers are not filled with complaints about programs no one is watching," he says, laughing. "When a show becomes a national conversation, it means the nation is taking ownership of it, so it doesn't really bother me anymore."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/story/2012-01-04/downtown-abbey-season-2/52369752/1
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/story/2012-01-04/downtown-abbey-season-2/52369752/1
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