Downton Abbey: from "jumping the shark" to sharknado (hook's still in deep, though)

At long last, possums, we're back in Downtontown, and I couldn't be happier! It's a show millions love, yours truly included, though this love can't blind me to the show's faults.

And so, in honour of Downton Abbey's season 4 launch last night on PBS, I'm reposting last January's  rueful commentary on Downton's lunge over the top (below). But first, a few nits picked from last night's episode, and the shape of the season to come:

--A few too many info dump scenes, or overly short scenes, for example, the one where Lady Mary finally breaks down to Carson (Carson, and not her own father! How pathetic is that?), and the other between Carson and his old friend Grigg. These scenes reminded me of that West Wing axiom: no meeting ever lasts much more than 30 seconds. Would that real life was this way! Yes, yes, I know: short scenes keep the story clipping along (as does all that rushing around), but lesser writers are forever cautioned to make each scene exist on its own merits and not simply to set up a future plot point.

--I'm sorry, but even Lord Crawley couldn't be that big a ninny (the Dowager's repeated references to fetching the Nanny to care for him were downright ridiculous). 

--Speaking of Nanny, there's another laughable pseudoconflict generated at breakneck speed. It gives me no pleasure to say it (by which I mean it gives me HEAPS of pleasure), but Downton Abbey's becoming a caricature of itself. From "jumping the shark" to sharknado.

--Despite Cora Levinson Crawley's supposed shiksadom (see below), last night's episode leaves little doubt Lady Edith being set up for a "peril in Germany" story line, lifted right from Herman Wouk's The Winds of War (a much worthier miniseries, IMHO).

From Renee Ghert-Zand's "Sorry fans, no Yiddishkeit at 'Downton Abbey'"

The reason neither Martha Levinson nor Lady Cora (played by Elizabeth McGovern) are Jewish, it turns out, is very simple: They’re Episcopalian.  

We know this because the definitive guide to Season 3, Jessica Fellowes and Matthew Sturgis’ “The Chronicles of Downton Abbey,” tells us so. (They should know: She’s the niece of Julian Fellowes, the show’s creator.)...

--Finally, still in the Jewish content vein, could somebody PLEASE tell us why Fellowes' is allergic to actually casting Jews as Jews? Shirley MacLaine and Paul Giamatti?? SERIOUSLY? (Okay, I know Martha Levinson isn't supposed to be Jewish but simply a brassy nouveau riche New Yorker...but isn't that kinda the same thing?) I suppose he'd feel comfortable casting Whites in Blackface to play Blacks, too? (PS This last is a joke...sort of)

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Downton Abbey jumps the shark (January 9, 2013)

Downton Abbey's season 3 premiere: Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville, foreground) continues to do dopey things, his mother-in-law, Martha Levinson (Shirley MacLaine) is fizzle and a gasbag, and viewers are reminded of familiar Downton truisms: “Downton’s in peril. Wills are complicated. Servants are sickly. Canadians are trouble.”

Photograph by: Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for Masterpiece-PBS

Spoiler alert! Contains Downton plot twists: If you haven’t yet seen the opening episode of Season 3 (or, for that matter, Seasons 1 or 2) and plan to, you might want to hold off on reading this article. It contains some of the notable developments in the plots of the series.
***************


I’d been psyched for months by the promise of the newest season of Downton Abbey, which the New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley recently called the Fifty Shades of Grey of its ilk: “soft-core pornography, but fixated on breeding and heritage rather than kinky sex.”

But I was hugely disappointed by the two-hour series opener the other night, which drew the Crawley family — and voyeurs like us along for the ride — to new depths of fatuousness.

In the interregnum prior to the start of Season 3, hubby and I took the opportunity to rescreen Seasons 1 and 2. I’d been struck by writer Julian Fellowes’s apparent initial intention to make Lord Grantham, Robert Crawley (played by Hugh Bonneville), the heart of the series. The opening credits have him striding majestically through the grounds, golden lab at his side. But it wasn’t long before daughter Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), whose young Turkish lover shockingly expires in her bedchamber (in most morality plays, death is what happens to the girl seduced, not the rake) and the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith, who makes the most of the immortal line “No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house — especially somebody they didn’t even know”) began to steal the show from him, and run with it. Lord Grantham becomes sadly befuddled — for example, imagining that he will see active duty in France during the First World War.

But this year’s offering is a contraption so creaky with ersatz conflict that it reminds me of Oz the Great and Terrible at the moment Dorothy discovers that behind the curtain is an ordinary little man.

Opening with the revelation of Lord Grantham’s utter and advised-against squandering of the family’s fortune in Canada — as June Thomas says on Slate, “they sure do return to the same themes over and over: Downton’s in peril. Wills are complicated. Servants are sickly. Canadians are trouble” — the episode continues at breakneck pace to the wedding of Mary and Matthew — though skipping completely what true Fifty Shades fans would prefer to have seen: the honeymoon. But first — oh, irony — it picks up their latest complication: the father of the late Lavinia, Matthew’s one-time fiancée, has died and Matthew is third in line to inherit his huge fortune.

While the issue of whether the two men before him as inheritors are alive or dead is needlessly spun out, Matthew — looking a tad overfed and unctuous, proving himself a fitting heir to the doltish current lord — announces his resolution to give away the money should it come his way, because taking it would constitute a form of theft. He arrives at this weird notion through tortured guilty logic: Lord Reginald Swire could only have intended the money to come to Matthew because he was the great love of Lavinia’s life, but Matthew betrayed that love, sending Lavinia to an early, broken-hearted death by way of the Spanish flu.

It makes Harlequin romances appear deep.

Lady Mary castigates Matthew with the deadliest of accusations. In refusing Swire’s bequest, in his willingness to allow, dare one say it, Downton to be lost, Matthew is, she charges, betraying that he is “not on our side.”

Seriously? This is the complication on which Fellowes seeks to hang the season?

It was the moment that Downton Abbey, despite its high production values and effervescent cast, finally jumped the shark.

And it was only downhill from there.

Shirley MacLaine as Martha Levinson in Downton Abbey.

Photograph by: Image courtesy , Nick Briggs

Shirley MacLaine, looking like she might have had a tad too much plastic surgery, was a total fizzle, her Martha Levinson (mother of the U.S.-born Cora, Lady Grantham) little more than a gasbag of accented clichés.

I'd heard rumours Dan Stevens (Matthew) would be gone from Downton, and this flop of a premiere was just the impetus I needed to root around the Internet to discover what happens to his character, while imagining all the time I might regain Sunday evenings by not having to watch the rest of the series.

As if.

Like Fifty Shades of Grey, Downton Abbey has become, most assuredly, one more in a long line of life’s guilty pleasures.

      

Darkness at Downton: Season 3, Episode 5

SPOILER ALERT: Key incidents in the episode are discussed, so if you haven't seen it, and intend to, you've been warned...
-------------------------------

I'm afraid Downton has grown very dark indeed, making it difficult to make light of this episode.

Last week's death of Sybil Branson, youngest daughter of Lord and Lady Crawley, reveals the deepest themes of this third season of Downton Abbey, and the series as a whole. The episode ended with the shocking convulsions after Sybil has birthed her bairn, the newest generation of Crawleys. (It isn't a strictly accurate portrayal of eclampsia, which remains a problem in pregnancy even now, ill understood and incurable, except by monitoring and early delivery at the earliest signs).

This week's pivotal scene takes place in Cora's bedroom when, blaming Robert for having insisted Sybil be treated as advised by the society doctor he'd engaged, tells him it's too soon for him to return to her bed.

And here is the clash of America vs. Aristocracy: Dr. Tapsell was "knighted and has a fashionable practice on Harley Street" while reliable country doctor Clarkson, who had counselled an emergency c-section hours before the delivery, was only the uber-reliable country doctor who had known the young woman for her entire life. A man of lower stature but greater knowledge--in this case, devolving to something as mundane as knowing that Sybil usually had slender ankles.

"You let all that nonsense weigh against saving our daughter's life. Which is what I find so very hard to forgive," actress Elizabeth McGovern sniffles.

Again and again across the series, we are confronted with Sir Robert, the benevolent slightly buffoonish one lord to rule them all, making decisions that, despite their impressive decisiveness, end up going south (e.g. losing Cora's entire fortune with one bad investment, which he was counselled against), and this episode is no exception.

He behaves insufferably over son-in-law Branson's wish to raise the baby as a Catholic. Robert balks, and has the temerity to invite Mr. Travis, the local Church of England vicar, round to dinner to dis popery. This is truly shocking when we take into account that a), Tom is heartbroken over the loss of his wife, for goodness sake, and b) that by the moral code of the Crawleys, surely importing a guest to insult a family member at table "simply isn't done." It demonstrates something that, to this crew, is clearly among the worst of all faux pas: bad manners.

When Mary confirms Sybil's intended the baby to be baptized Catholic, Robert is "flabbergasted." Cora says, drily, "You're always flabbergasted by the unconventional."

Robert seems blind to how inconsiderate he is being, blundering about like an injured bull, and demonstrating his increasing unfitness to lead.

Meantime, downstairs, a parallel story plays out with Carson the butler, who forbids any member of the staff having dealings with Ethel, the fallen maid, who has resurfaced as Isobel Crawley's new cook and housekeeper. Ethel, you may recall, while working at Downton, was seduced by an officer convalescing there during the war. Immediately dismissed, she ended up having a child out of wedlock and was forced into prostitution to support them. Ethel had given up her son to a better life with the now dead officer's parents and, latterly, been taken in by reformer Isobel, who hopes to help her overcome her degradation. In other words, Ethel's path to ruin happened on Carson and the Lord's watch, yet all they did was blame her for her misdeeds, and shame and humiliate her. Another among many shocking indictments of the social conventions of the Victorian era.

When Isobel suggests a luncheon for the Downton "girls"--"does that include me?" warbles the Dowager Duchess--the stage is set for the confrontation: between the men and the women, between creaky notions of propriety and the ancient concepts of mercy, made modern in the guise of rehabilitation. Thank God, mercy wins.

Mrs. Patmore agrees to help Ethel with a menu and cooking pointers (Mrs. Hughes has been defying Carson's edict by helping Ethel out for years). And when Robert storms into the luncheon, demanding his women--Cora, the two daughters, and his mother--leave immediately, Cora refuses. And the women stay put. "It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding," the Dowager offers by way of explanation.

The leadership upstairs and downstairs is gradually being chiselled away by the growing strength and enfranchisement of the women, and the mounting irrelevancy of Victorian social conventions. That is my read on the real message of Downton, though it be swathed in melodrama.

And the ultimate proof of this, which I realized most clearly after watching the end of season shocker, is telegraphed by the opening credits: they're alphabetical. Not "starring" this one and that one. In other words, no member of this cast is to be considered above the others. Sir Julian Fellowes demonstrates by metaphor in the very first moments of the program, that he thinks it best to treat all his actors equally.

Downton Abbey: social history writ small, wrapped in melodrama, and high production values. But make no mistake, the values here are not simply of production: they are social values, resonant and real, and so is the historical backdrop. And that is the lesson of its exploding popularity, what propelled it to the top of the TV drama heap worldwide, and why we keep watching.



A version of this post originally published on The Huffington Post Canada

Downton Abbey jumps the shark

Downton Abbey's season 3 premiere: Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville, foreground) continues to do dopey things, his mother-in-law, Martha Levinson (Shirley MacLaine) is fizzle and a gasbag, and viewers are reminded of familiar Downton truisms: “Downton’s in peril. Wills are complicated. Servants are sickly. Canadians are trouble.”

Photograph by: Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for Masterpiece-PBS

Spoiler alert! Contains Downton plot twists: If you haven’t yet seen the opening episode of Season 3 (or, for that matter, Seasons 1 or 2) and plan to, you might want to hold off on reading this article. It contains some of the notable developments in the plots of the series.
***************


I’d been psyched for months by the promise of the newest season of Downton Abbey, which the New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley recently called the Fifty Shades of Grey of its ilk: “soft-core pornography, but fixated on breeding and heritage rather than kinky sex.”

But I was hugely disappointed by the two-hour series opener the other night, which drew the Crawley family — and voyeurs like us along for the ride — to new depths of fatuousness.

In the interregnum prior to the start of Season 3, hubby and I took the opportunity to rescreen Seasons 1 and 2. I’d been struck by writer Julian Fellowes’s apparent initial intention to make Lord Grantham, Robert Crawley (played by Hugh Bonneville), the heart of the series. The opening credits have him striding majestically through the grounds, golden lab at his side. But it wasn’t long before daughter Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), whose young Turkish lover shockingly expires in her bedchamber (in most morality plays, death is what happens to the girl seduced, not the rake) and the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith, who makes the most of the immortal line “No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house — especially somebody they didn’t even know”) began to steal the show from him, and run with it. Lord Grantham becomes sadly befuddled — for example, imagining that he will see active duty in France during the First World War.

But this year’s offering is a contraption so creaky with ersatz conflict that it reminds me of Oz the Great and Terrible at the moment Dorothy discovers that behind the curtain is an ordinary little man.

Opening with the revelation of Lord Grantham’s utter and advised-against squandering of the family’s fortune in Canada — as June Thomas says on Slate, “they sure do return to the same themes over and over: Downton’s in peril. Wills are complicated. Servants are sickly. Canadians are trouble” — the episode continues at breakneck pace to the wedding of Mary and Matthew — though skipping completely what true Fifty Shades fans would prefer to have seen: the honeymoon. But first — oh, irony — it picks up their latest complication: the father of the late Lavinia, Matthew’s one-time fiancée, has died and Matthew is third in line to inherit his huge fortune.

While the issue of whether the two men before him as inheritors are alive or dead is needlessly spun out, Matthew — looking a tad overfed and unctuous, proving himself a fitting heir to the doltish current lord — announces his resolution to give away the money should it come his way, because taking it would constitute a form of theft. He arrives at this weird notion through tortured guilty logic: Lord Reginald Swire could only have intended the money to come to Matthew because he was the great love of Lavinia’s life, but Matthew betrayed that love, sending Lavinia to an early, broken-hearted death by way of the Spanish flu.

It makes Harlequin romances appear deep.

Lady Mary castigates Matthew with the deadliest of accusations. In refusing Swire’s bequest, in his willingness to allow, dare one say it, Downton to be lost, Matthew is, she charges, betraying that he is “not on our side.”

Seriously? This is the complication on which Fellowes seeks to hang the season?

It was the moment that Downton Abbey, despite its high production values and effervescent cast, finally jumped the shark.

And it was only downhill from there.

Shirley MacLaine as Martha Levinson in Downton Abbey.

Photograph by: Image courtesy , Nick Briggs

Shirley MacLaine, looking like she might have had a tad too much plastic surgery, was a total fizzle, her Martha Levinson (mother of the U.S.-born Cora, Lady Grantham) little more than a gasbag of accented clichés.

I had heard the rumours that Dan Stevens (Matthew) would not appear in future seasons of Downton, and this flop of a premiere was just the impetus I needed to root through the Internet to discover what happens to his character. All the while, I was imagining all the time I might save on Sunday evenings by not having to watch the rest of the series.

As if. Like Fifty Shades of Grey, Downton Abbey has become, most assuredly, one more in a long line of life’s guilty pleasures.

        Published January 10th, 2013 in The Montreal Gazette (with fewer spoilers!)