Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary on “Downton Abbey.” Warning: this post contains spoilers. If you don’t want to know how World War I turned out, don’t read any further.
February 19, 2012, 10:39 PM
By DAVE ITZKOFF
When you have only a few episodes and a Christmas special to address World War I and its aftermath, needless to say, you have to cover a lot of ground very quickly.
So it went for the Crawley family and its servants at “Downton Abbey,” the PBS “Masterpiece” series that concluded its second season on Sunday night after a stretch in which: the heir presumptive, Matthew Crawley (played by Dan Stevens), appeared to be grievously wounded in battle and left paralyzed, only to make a miraculous recovery; Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) pursued her practical if unromantic courtship of the ruthless newspaper publisher Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen); the kitchen maid Daisy (Sophie McShera) married ill-fated William (Thomas Howes) before he died from war injuries; the housemaid Anna (Joanne Froggatt) and valet Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) married before he was arrested for the suspected murder of his previous wife; and, just when everything seemed to have settled down, a bout of Spanish influenza knocked off Matthew’s fiancée, Lavinia Swire (Zoe Boyle), leaving him free to become engaged to Lady Mary.
Also: the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) made some cutting remarks and the dog Isis went missing for a bit.
These miseries, machinations and occasional moments of joy were all set in motion by Julian Fellowes, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter (“Gosford Park”) who is the creator and an executive producer of “Downton Abbey.” In a recent telephone interview from Britain, where work is underway on a third season of the show, Mr. Fellowes, 62, spoke about the many story lines at play in Season 2; the American television series he is influenced by; and when, if ever, “Downton Abbey” might come to a conclusion.
Here are excerpts from that conversation:
Q. You knew going into this season that World War I was going to dominate the narrative and dictate the fates of your characters. Did you sit down in advance and decide who is coming back alive and who isn’t, or did you let things happen more organically?
A. I don’t think we did sit down and say, “He’ll live and he’ll die” at the very beginning. But we were conscious of the fact that we had to kill someone we knew really well and liked. Because the danger is, the only people who ever get killed are people with two lines. There is a kind of falseness to that. In my own life, my grandfather died of disease in the trenches, my great uncle died of wounds. It’s not that this was something that happened to people one hardly knew. That went right through society, top to bottom. People were killed and maimed in this war. And we knew in the end, it was the luckless William, because we all loved him, who had to die. Matthew was very badly wounded, though not as bad in the end as it was feared. We knew we had to make it pretty grim for people who were central to the narrative, yes.
Q. Probably the audience would be calling for your head if you dispensed with Matthew entirely, but you still created the possibility, for at least a couple of episodes, that he would be left paralyzed and unable to have children. Why not leave him in that state?
A. To be honest, when you’re running a series and you have an open end, you don’t want to limit yourself too much with the choices you’ve got for a particular character. In a way, being able to father a child was a bigger issue than whether or not he could walk again. But once you’ve done that, I’m not sure where we would have gone with him. Putting him through the mill and letting him come out the other end was as harsh as we were prepared to be.
Read more of this wonderful interview with Julian Fellowes: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/julian-fellowes-overcomes-his-scruples-and-looks-back-at-season-2-of-downton-abbey/
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