Saying that a television series depicts the English aristocracy on the brink of World War I and beyond is almost a disservice — the description sounds like yet another big Masterpiece Theater bore, or worse, an amusing one like “Downton Abbey.” “Parade’s End,” a co-production of the BBC and HBO that begins on Tuesday on HBO, looks like a lush elegy to the Edwardian age, but it’s not nearly as swoony and nostalgic as most others of the genre. Tom Stoppard adapted Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy into a five-part series, streamlining and speeding up the story without dumbing it down.
Like Ford’s modernist opus, and its brainy, punctilious hero, Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch), the series is not easy to follow or instantly love, but it is impossible to dismiss. That’s partly thanks to artful storytelling and gifted acting, especially by Rebecca Hall, who is a bewitching hoot in the role of Christopher’s bored, unfaithful wife, Sylvia.
It’s a series that inevitably draws comparisons with “Downton Abbey,” since they share the same upper-class trappings and totems. Tietjens, a brilliant statistician, is an old-fashioned English gentleman, good with horses, furniture and propriety. He is chivalrously loyal to Sylvia, a spoiled beauty who scorns her husband’s stuffy rectitude, even as she is piqued by it. She dismisses him as a “great lump,” yet can’t stop poking him.
“Parade’s End” tells the story of a bad marriage, set in a much broader context of a rotting civilization.
And that’s the real difference between it and “Downton Abbey.” That show is a gauzy anachronism in period costumes; the first novel of “Parade’s End” was published in 1924, and the series is enmeshed in the great cataclysm of the time, underscoring the cruelty of the age as much as its charm.
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http://tv.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/arts/television/parades-end-with-benedict-cumberbatch-and-rebecca-hall.html?pagewanted=all
