Downton Abbey Revisited

Downton Abbey is now ¾ of the way done, and I’m already feeling nostalgic for it. I wish it were a 12 part series, or better yet, a 26 part series like the original Forsyte Saga. When that series aired in America back in 1969, friends would join each other for tea and sherry parties and watch it all together; now, most of us catch it when we can, and usually alone.

This is not to say that I haven’t had my problems with the show. The costumes continue to be gorgeous, the period details exquisite. The whole series is lushness unlimited, inside and out Downtown Abbey. And Julian Fellowes knows how to write some tasty dialogue, especially for Maggie Smith, who sometimes makes a remark, not necessarily because her character would have done so, but because it’s good entertainment (when her American daughter-in-law proposes that Mary go to New York to find a rich husband who can save the estate, Smith quips “I don’t think things are that desperate”).

But the soap-like plot points. Oh, boy.

All classic serials use melodrama, that quintessential nineteenth-century form. And when it’s done well, it’s great fun (as in the stony characterization of Lady Dedlock in Andrew Davies’ Bleak House, or the subplot revolving around the hypervillianous Frenchman in Little Dorrit). But these two series thrived on the excesses of theatricality. Downton Abbey, on the other hand, asks to be viewed realistically.

So, how, exactly, do we take “realistically” the representation of a medical procedure wherein a man, afflicted with “dropsy,” gets stabbed in the heart with a needle and, ten seconds later, wakes up from his coma-like state smiling at his wife?

OR

The scene where a young man, who is trying to seduce one of the fair Crawley daughters, suddenly dies of a heart attack? The fact of the death is bad enough. But then, minutes later, we see his body being dragged down the stately halls of Downton Abbey by the fair daughter, a maid, and the fair daughter’s regal mother, all to avoid a scandal.


And yet, just as I was about to get really cranky with the series, a subsequent scene has Maggie Smith remark that no Englishman would dream of dying in someone else's house, especially someone he didn't know well.

In this series, as in so many classic series—beginning with The Forsyte Saga in 1967 and continuing to the present—a soap-opera plot is saved by good acting and dialogue. And whether I like it or not, I’m absolutely hooked.

P.S. Does anyone want to guess what Mr. Bates’ secret is? What is “the more” he refers to when he tells the maid who loves him, “I was married but there’s more.” Does it have to do with the war? His injury? Has he committed a crime? What does he mean when he says, “I’m not a free man?”