Parsing Downton Abbey

By Editor |

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

I am an avid fan of Downton Abbey, having watched every episode multiple times.  I have lots of thoughts about the series -- about what's good and what's bad -- and naturally I want to share them.

Let me start out by saying that the rape of Anna in season 4 was a step too far.  Julian Fellowes, the creator, has said that he merely did what he always does, which is to take his characters to the brink and then bring them back.  Rape, however, is something that no one comes back from.  From the audience's perspective, to see a character that we know and love get raped is absolutely shocking.  It isn't the mission of the writer of a TV show to horrify the audience.  Fellowes points out that he didn't show the rape; but showing us Anna's terror, and then leaving the rest to our imaginations, was a good deal worse.  After watching that episode, I became depressed and had bad dreams for three weeks.

Downton Abbey is a "feel good" television series.  With the exception of the rape, Fellowes pulls all his punches -- and that's a good thing.  If he shocked us in every episode, people would stop watching.  Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining.  One of the reasons the series is so popular is that it satisfies our sense of justice.  Thomas's mettle is tested repeatedly, but he deserves it.  Mr. Bates is taken to the edge by his first wife, but that gives Anna a chance to save him and be a heroine.  Lady Grantham almost dies from Spanish flu (the operative word being "almost"), but she is better than ever once she recovers.  Lord Grantham squanders his family's fortune, but is saved by Matthew's inheritance. In season 2, Matthew is made a paraplegic by the war, but he miraculously recovers.  William, a footman, dies while trying to defend Matthew on the battlefield; but William was not one of the most interesting or complex characters, and his death was peaceful.  Yes, Fellowes kills off Sybil and Matthew in season 3 (Sybil was my favorite character), but he had no choice because the actors, being fools, wanted to leave the series.

The truth is, Downton Abbey is so delightful because it is so unrealistic.  Every situation seems to resolve itself in the most satisfying way (although that's always true of good fiction).  The characters are consistently more intelligent, more aware and (in most cases) more compassionate than people are in real life.  In real life, Lord and Lady Grantham wouldn't be so friendly with, or compassionate towards, their servants.  They wouldn't view their tenant farmers as a large family.  They wouldn't help and continue to employ servants who get in trouble.  Neither the family nor the servants would be so emotionally open to each other, or sensitive to each other's moods, or compassionate towards one another.  In the real world, "familiarity breeds contempt" is the norm, while on Downton Abbey, familiarity breeds compassion.  We all like the idea that the world could be like Downton Abbey, but it isn't.

A year or two after the Downton series started, I read an article about the Edwardian era.  An elderly woman who had been a maid to a young lady was interviewed.  The lady and the maid became like fast friends, but it was an entirely one-sided relationship.  The needs and feelings of the lady were the only ones that mattered.  The lady rarely thought about or focussed on the feelings of the maid, and the maid never felt that she was acknowledged as an individual.  In the Downton fantasy land, the Crawley family is aware of the servants as human beings, and are concerned about their feelings.  I'm not saying that Edwardian aristocrats never cared about their servants, but I don't think it happened often.  I suspect that if an aristocrat developed a sexual interest in a servant, then the servant's feelings would be considered (and not necessarily even then).

It may sound like I am leveling criticisms at Julian Fellowes, but I'm not (well, not entirely).  Downton Abbey depicts people behaving in idealized ways.  Fellowes is showing us humanity at its best, and that's why we love the series.  There are very few among us who live up to our ideals, but we admire people who do (provided that we aren't being compared to them).  There are other English period dramas on TV that show people behaving more realistically, and I can barely stand to watch them.

The genius of Downton Abbey is in the nuanced acting.  There are times when it seems like I can see the characters thinking.  In my experience, no other series on TV has ever shown that kind of nuanced behavior.  One example is when Lady Grantham is telling Mrs. Hughes that Major Bryant has died.  She says, "I'm afraid that's the end of our story."  O'Brien asks, "What story, milady?"  Lady Grantham pauses for a second, looking momentarily distracted, then glances quickly at O'Brien while focussing her mind on an answer, and then back to Mrs. Hughes; and then she gives O'Brien a tactful answer while looking at Mrs. Hughes.  Even though that was a fairly minor scene, the nuanced acting was superb.

When old Lady Grantham is arguing with Isobel Crawley about young Pegg's suspected thievery, and Spratt brings in the netsuke figurine that she thought had been stolen, the play of emotions across Lady Grantham's face is amazing:  gratitude, relief, embarrassment, vulnerability.  I don't know how much of that brilliant acting is due to Maggie Smith's skill as an actor or Julian Fellowe's direction, but it is delicious to watch.

Another example is when Edna, who is about to quit (her scheme to snare Tom Branson having failed), encounters Thomas Barrow on the stairs.  Thomas sees her distress and says something cutting.  Edna spins around and says, "Do you ever wonder why no one likes you?"  She then gives Thomas a piercing look accompanied by a gesture of the head which is full of meaning, a gesture that we have all given from time to time.  It is a slight turn of the head, while staring straight at your victim, right before you skewer him with a pointed criticism.  Yet at the same moment that she makes that piercing gesture, you can still see the humiliation in her face from her encounter with Mrs. Hughes.  In that one gesture, you see all of Edna's emotions:  smugness, triumph and contempt towards Thomas, yet also defeat and humiliation at the hands of Mrs. Hughes.  Moments like that, in which you can see more than one emotion playing across an actor's face, are rare in the world of drama, either on TV or in the movies -- yet Fellowes puts them in every episode.

One of the scenes that I particularly like occurs during the time when Downton Abbey is turned into a convalescent home for military officers.  Isobel Crawley arrives and discovers that the schedules have been changed without her consent, and she marches into Lady Grantham's bedroom to have it out with her.  Isobel is indignant; but as it becomes clear that Lady Grantham is not going to budge, Isobel runs though a gamut of emotions:  pride, anger, indignation, surprise, fear, desperation and then humiliation.  Watching the emotions play across her face is wonderful.  And like Edna above, you don't see just one emotion at a time, but the whole lot of them mixed together.  What skill it must take for an actor to express two, three or four emotions at one time.  (Isobel Crawley is a favorite character of mine.)

It isn't just the nuanced acting, of course, but also the nuanced dialogue.  One particularly delightful scene is when Lady Mary and Tom Branson are talking in the library in season 5.  I'm referring to the conversation in which Mary reveals to Tom that she is going to dump Lord Gillingham.  The conversation wends this way and that, revealing things that the characters might not have meant to reveal.  At the end, Tom says (half in jest), "If you love me, you'll support me" (or something like that).  Lady Mary then looks at him with the realization on her face that perhaps she does love him!  And in so doing, Fellowes drops a hint that perhaps Mary will end up marrying Tom!  Wouldn't that be an interesting development!  (That didn't end up happening.)


Wooden Men

Not all of the characters are so nuanced.  Fellowes seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the male gender.  His idea of the perfect man is someone who is stoic and unemotional and wooden.  These characteristics are epitomized by Mr. Drewe, one of the tenant farmers, whose behavior is so unnaturally reserved and hyper-masculine that it seems comical.  Yet Drewe, in dealing with Lady Edith, is shown to be a feminist at heart.  The two images -- outer hyper-masculinity and inner feminism -- just don't mix.  Similarly, Lord Gillingham's severely modest and understated behavior comes across as awkward and self-effacing -- at least until Mary rejects him, at which point he livens up a little.  Even the original hero of the series, Matthew Crawley, was stiff and stoic.  Indeed, I became so tired of Matthew's self-righteous rants (first about Lavinia, then about his inheritance from Lavinia's father, and then about Lord Grantham's mismanagement of the estate) that I could hardly stand to watch him any more.  I always assumed that Matthew's one-dimensional behavior was the result of the poor skill of the actor, but now I wonder if Fellowes wasn't responsible.

In season 4, Fellowes seems to be turning the Tom Branson character into one of those stoic, self-effacing automatons.  The angry revolutionary is gone, replaced by a faithful, dutiful (if insecure) member of the family who behaves more like the good servant than he ever did when he was the chauffeur.  We are supposed to feel gratified that Tom has been won over by the family, but there is no depth to his conversion.  He even makes fun of himself, saying to Isobel Crawley that he doesn't know what happened to the "silly chauffeur chap" that he used to be.  Towards the end of season 4, Fellowes has Branson talking in a staccato man-speak, as when he advises Edith that they have to "fight our corner".  Once Branson abandons his revolutionary persona, he is consistently wooden and awkward.  My tendency is to blame the actor, but I suspect that Fellowes is more to blame.  As a member of the aristocracy, I suspect that Fellowes had a distant father, which may have caused him to develop an idealized (though unrealistic) concept of the male figure, but that's only a guess as to why his male characters have less depth than the women.

On the other hand, perhaps I'm expecting too much.  Traditionally, men have not shown as much emotion as women have, and perhaps Fellowes is just portraying them in what he considers to be a realistic way. In contrast to the wooden men I've just described, there have been a few male characters that showed a lot of character.  Among them are Molesley, Thomas Barrow and Mr. Bricker.  Molesley is particularly delightful.

There's more to the Branson character than meets the eye.  Fellowes, in my opinion, has written Branson to be a representative of the hoi polloi.  By melding into the aristocratic Crawley family, Branson, in his role as a surrogate for his class, provides forgiveness to the aristocracy for their multitude of sins.  Lord Grantham keeps telling Branson that he has "come so far", and Branson accepts that as true; but in what way has Branson come so far?  Fellowes never tells us.  The Kiernan Branson character -- Tom's "gorilla" of a brother -- is part of the parable too:  He represents the depths to which Tom might plunge if he doesn't allow himself to be absorbed by the family, which in turn represents the higher ideals of humanity.  As if to drive the point home, Fellowes has an old beau of Sybil's slip Branson a micky in season 3, and the numbskullery of Branson's class comes pouring out of his mouth at the dinner table.  (I wonder if Fellowes is also making a statement about the Irish here.)

When Branson returns from America in season 6 and says this -- "I realize that Downton is my home, and you're my family" -- it made me want to upchuck.  What about Branson's extended Irish family in both Ireland and America?  If Branson had just concluded that he liked living on the estate, I could have accepted that; but to choose the Crawley family over his own family is pretty outrageous.  By the end of season 6, Branson's transformation to family lapdog is complete.  His role in those episodes is, variously, to be the family's eccentric wise man (a la Yoda) and the family's wise-cracking clown, always with something cheerful and helpful to say.  The new Branson isn't convincing.

Instead of accepting the Crawley family as his own, there is another way that Branson could have made his peace with the Crawley family:  By the time the series ends in 1925, it was obvious to everyone that the landed gentry class was under siege and was losing power.  That being the case, Branson could have simply acknowledged to himself that there was no longer a need to hate them.  On the other hand, perhaps the way things turned out was for the best:  Allen Leech, the actor who played Branson, gained weight after season 3, and revolutionaries aren't very convincing when they are chubby.

As long as we are talking about the lower classes paying homage to the upper classes, the Drewe character does that also.  Drewe's civilized and grateful behavior when he learns that he has to leave Lord Grantham's land is entirely unrealistic.  Having been snared by Edith into a dead-end situation, his only reasonable reaction would be anger.  Yet at the end, he quickly agrees to leave, and then he heaps praise on Lord Grantham for kicking him out.  Fellowes really does see a well-intentioned (albeit selfish) lord as being the epitome of human-kind.  Of course Drewe has to go!  The needs of a god's daughter supersede the needs of a coarse tenant farmer.

Regarding Lord Gillingham, Fellowes missed what I think would have been an interesting plot development.  Fellowes could have written Lord Gillingham to be more desperate for Mary's love, to the point where he batters her when she rejects him (not in the park, but perhaps later at Downton).  In so doing, Fellowes would have given Mary a taste of what Anna experienced at the hands of Mr. Green, thereby drawing them closer together.  I'm not suggesting that he beat her to a pulp, but that he strike her at least once.  If Fellowes then wanted to redeem Tony, he could have Tony apologize afterwards.  (However, my suggested plot development would have erased the entire story line involving Mabel Lane Fox.)


Thomas Barrow

When season 4 started and I saw that Fellowes was still writing Thomas to be selfish and devious, I wanted to throw a chair at the television.  Thomas has been shown every kindness and consideration, yet he never learns anything from it.  In season 1, Bates refuses to tattle on him when Thomas stole the wine, yet Thomas persists in seeing Bates as an enemy.  Bates then saves Thomas' ass in season 3, but Thomas doesn't learn compassion from being saved.  Lord Grantham keeps Thomas on the staff simply because Thomas is good at cricket, yet Thomas feels no gratitude.  Indeed, Thomas becomes even worse in season 4.  He plots with the new lady's maid, and openly acknowledges his own corruption.  But that's not in keeping with the old Thomas.  The old Thomas believed that his deviousness was a justified response to a world that was against him.  He saw himself as a survivor, not as someone who was corrupt.  In season 4, Fellowes also makes Thomas obnoxious, as Thomas persistently badgers the new lady's maid for information.  It just isn't realistic.

Keeping Thomas corrupt has some risks that Fellowes may not have considered.  For him to show the only gay character in the series as persistently bad from one season to the next has the potential to get his gay viewers angry.  I myself have started to feel offended.

I've also become tired of the way that Fellowes keeps rescuing Thomas from his own stupidity.  Fellowes rescues him again in the first episode of season 5.  I've had enough of Thomas's shenanigans, and I suspect that most viewers feel the same way.


Mr. Green

Putting the death of Mr. Green off-camera was a huge mistake, in my opinion.  It was incredibly anti-climactic to simply hear about it at the fete.  If Fellowes wanted there to be some mystery about who killed him, there were other ways to do it.  He could have shown Green sauntering down the street, then looking up and saying, "What are you doing here?" (as we know he said), and then suddenly falling in front of a lorry, without showing any gore or the person who pushed him.  But to put the whole thing off-camera was terribly disappointing.  The audience needed to have the satisfaction of seeing Green "get it".  This is an instance in which Fellowes pulled his punch, but shouldn't have.


Alfred Nugent

When Lady Edith is abandoned at the alter, and the staff has to eat the wedding food, Alfred complains about having to eat "pickety bits", and asks for some cheese.  Yet by season 4, Alfred is intent on becoming a gourmet cook.  Fellowes didn't manage this transition realistically, in my opinion.  When Daisy, the assistant cook, is being hard on the new kitchen maid Ivy, Alfred shows her a cooking trick to impress Daisy, telling Ivy that he picked it up sometime in the past.  But if Alfred had had an interest in cooking for a long time, why was he turned off to the gourmet foods from Edith's wedding?  This is just one of the many inconsistencies that have popped up in the series.


Lord Grantham

For the most part, I think the Lord Grantham character has been well played.  However, when Robert learns about Mary's dalliance with Kemal Pamuk, he tells her to break with Richard Carlisle and then "find a cowboy in the Middle West and bring him back to shake us up a bit".  But this is the same man who can't accept Tom (the chauffeur) as Sybil's husband, so I see that as an inconsistency.  Fellowes is fond of the feel-good moment, and he inserts them even when they aren't consistent with his own characters.


Lady Mary

Mary, Mary, Mary, when are you going to stop talking in that haughty royal accent?  In the beginning of the series, it was believable that the teen-aged Mary would put on airs; but by season 4 she had endured the death of her sister and husband.  Some of the haughtiness should be gone, and she should sound a little more down-to-earth.  Yet in season 5, the haughty airs and diction have become so routine that it is difficult to like her any more.  Not only that, her haughty diction has gone from being breathy to throaty, and the throaty speech sounds even more phony.  Mary is the star of Downton Abbey -- Fellowes never specifically says that, but it is clear that she is the central character around which all the others revolve.  It is an odd television series indeed that has a central character who is hard to love or identify with.

One little nitpick:  When Tony (Lord Gillingham) opens the door to their adjoining hotel rooms in Liverpool and tells Mary that he is going to ravish her all night long, she says, "What could be fairer than that?"  If I were in Mary's shoes, I would be a little nervous about commiting myself to a week of sex with a man I wasn't sure I loved.  If Fellowes had shown Mary to be nervous instead of confident, I think that scene would have been more realistic.


The Dowager Countess

So much has been said about how Maggie Smith, who plays old Lady Grantham (the Dowager Countess), has been given all the choice lines, and about how well she delivers her "zingers", that one is tempted to dismiss her as just another wise-cracking grandma, like Sophia on the Golden Girls.  But she is so much more than that.  Her nuanced acting is second to none.  I've already given one example above.  Another example is her uneasiness at finding Pegg in her drawing room when he was watering the plants.  Also, note how perfectly acted the scene is when she quizzes Spratt about the missing netsuke figurine.  Her portrayal of the the sick Dowager Countess is also superb.  I'm mentioning these examples from season 4 simply because they are fresh in my mind, but I could find a dozen examples from every season.  I don't think that I've seen even one scene with Maggie Smith in which she didn't bring something special to the performance.

In season 6, there's a scene that shows Smith acting with her eyes.  At the end of a tiring day, Denker is helping her undress, and the Dowager let's slip that there may be layoffs at the abbey.  The Dowager immediately cautions Denker not to gossip about it, and does so several times, looking at Denker in the mirror.  You can see that the Dowager is tired, but also worried about the changing times, but also concerned about Denker's loose lips.  After the final warning not to gossip, the Dowager locks her eyes on Denker (through the mirror) and gives a final nod as if to seal Denker's silence, but Denker doesn't notice and just walks away.  It's a delicious moment.  In all of her scenes, the intelligence in Smith's eyes is always very apparent, and that's one of the delightful things about watching her.  She is an actor for an intelligent audience.  (And to see so much intelligence coming from Smith at the age of 82 or 83 is wonderful.  By age 82, my mother was developing dementia.)


The Disappearing Figurine and Other Missteps

The number of servants shown at Downton Abbey is much, much less than the actual number of servants such a house would have had in pre-World War I England.  No matter which episode you are watching, no more than a dozen or so servants are depicted.  Great manor houses often employed thirty or forty servants.  The dining room in the basement of Downton Abbey, as depicted in the TV series, couldn't have held them all.  (In case you don't know, the entire basement in the television series is a stage set; the actual basement of Highclere Castle, which has a modern kitchen, is never shown.)

In the scene in which the Dowager Countess quizzes Rosamund and Edith about their upcoming trip to the continent, a large figurine of Hermes or Mercury can be seen behind her; but when she is shown in close-up, the figurine isn't there.  Although the close-ups are shown from a slightly lower angle than the other shots, there's no way that the figurine could disappear altogether.  It is a rare mistake on the part of Fellowes.

I saw a similar mistake in season 4.  When standing outside with Isobel Crawley and Sarah Bunting, Tom Branson is shown standing in front of a wall with foliage above it, but the close-ups of his face show him standing with his back to a distant building (the church, I believe).  The church can also be seen in the other shots, but it is off to the side.  For Branson to be standing with his back to the building in the close-ups, both he and Sarah Bunting (to whom he was speaking) would have had to move their positions.

It is possible that in the above two instances, Fellowes is trying to add emphasis to the close-ups by framing the characters' faces with a more desirable background, but it doesn't work -- at least, it doesn't work for someone like me who watches each episode 15 times.

In season 1, or perhaps 2, Mary and Edith are together in the library.  As the camera moves, you can see someone getting out of the way.  All that can be glimpsed is the person's arm (in what appears to be modern clothes), but it's still quite visible.

In season 3, Thomas Barrow (through Mr. Bates) saves himself from O'Brien's machinations by threatening to reveal O'Brien's secret about "her ladyship's soap", but in season 2 it was made clear that O'Brien never told Barrow that secret.  This was the first inconsistency in the series which, to me, seemed very glaring.

Amazingly, Fellowes uses a clip of Anna Bates crying in front of a door twice in season 4 -- same stance, same dress, same movements, same sob.  The first instance is when Anna finds out that Mr. Green, who raped her, is returning to Downton Abbey.  The second instance is when Anna finds out that Mr. Bates is going to American at a time when she needs him.

In season 5 (right before the fire), Lord Gillingham is shown popping out of his bedroom and stepping into Lady Mary's bedroom, which is right next door.  Yet we know from the Pamuk incident in season 1 that the men's bedrooms (the "bachelors' quarters") are at the other end of the Abbey from the women's bedrooms.  Even if the family's bedrooms were located in one area, we could be sure that a guest's bedroom -- especially a male guest's bedroom -- would be very distant.

Similarly, how did Simon Bricker know where Cora's bedroom was?

In season 4, after spending two nights and two days nursing the Dowager Countess, without sleep, Isobel Crawley appears as fresh as if she had just had a long nap, and she even returns to play cards later in the evening.  There's no person on earth who can miss two nights of sleep and not look tired.

Throughout the series, Crawley family members go back and forth to London, and they usually use Aunt Rosamund's house as "an 'otel", as Edith put it in one episode.  But then at the end of the fourth season we find out that the Crawley's have their own residence in London (called "Grantham House"), with a permanent staff, so that doesn't make any sense.  Grantham House looks like it is big enough and glorious enough to house royalty, so one has to wonder why they always stay at Rosamund's.  It's important to remember that, in the chronology of the series, ten or twelve years have passed.  If Grantham House had been there for all that time, it would have been mentioned before.

There's simply no way that Edith could go to the continent for ten months without everyone knowing that she went there to have a baby.  Fellowes writes his characters to be sharp, but how sharp can they be if they can't figure out that Marigold Drewe is Edith's daughter?

One can understand why Mrs. Drewe wasn't told that Edith was Marigold's mother; but once she started to object to Edith's visits, she should have been told.  That would have allowed her to see that Edith had a legitimate right to visit Marigold, and the conflict would have been avoided.  Creating conflict based on a lack of communication is a cheap plot device which is more suited to sit-coms like Seinfeld than to Downton Abbey.

I have to say at this point that the dramatic scene in which Edith takes Marigold from Mrs. Drewe is quite remarkable.  It was a tour de force of intense acting on the part of Emma Lowndes, the actor who played Mrs. Drewe.  I found that scene totally believable.  I hope that we see Mrs. Drewe again.

During the time when Edith is constantly at Downton and constantly depressed because she can't visit Marigold, we later find out that she was running Gregson's publishing company, as well as writing an article for his magazine.  That's implausible for many reasons.  First, she is shown to be in Yorkshire almost all of the time (the magazine business is in London), and she isn't shown doing anything related to the business.  Second, running a publishing company would've had some effect on her life and emotions, but we see none.  At the very least it should have taken her out of herself and made her less depressed.  I suppose it's possible that Edith simply left some lieutenant in charge of the company, but the whole thing still seems implausible.

The fire scene in Edith's room is not realistic.  Are we supposed to believe that there is a handy fire hose available to fight the fire with?  Plumbing was a fairly new thing at that point, and it seems strange that they would have installed a fire hose right in the Abbey.  Indeed, if there is a fire hose on the 2nd floor near the bedrooms, then the assumption must be that there are fire hoses all over the Abbey.  Of course, I know nothing about English manor houses, and perhaps that was something they actually did in those days.

When Lord Grantham and Tom are fighting the fire, it shows them aiming the hose over the flames.  The fire brigade then comes and takes over, although the fire was small enough that Tom and Lord Grantham should have been able to put it out (especially given the large amount of water coming out of the hose).  Later, outside the manor, when Lord Grantham tells everyone that it is all right to go back in, there is no mention of the thousands of gallons of water that have been sprayed all over Edith's room.  In real life, almost the whole staff would have been pressed into service to clean it all up to prevent water damage to the building and to the rooms below.

When the Dowager Countess visits Prince Kuragin in his room, the room is shown to be dilapidated, with a chunk of plaster missing from the ceiling, exposing the lath, and with the wallpaper pealing away.  But the damage to the ceiling is nothing but a paint job, and poor one at that.  They undoubtedly filmed that scene in a real room, and I'm sure that they didn't want to destroy the plaster just for one scene.  Even so, they should have hired a better artist.

At the end of season 5, Lady Rose "saves" butler Stowell at Brancaster Castle by not telling Lord Sinderby that it was Stowell who revealed the existence of Diana Clark.  But Sinderby could have guessed anyway because Stowell is the only person who could have done it.  The only people from the Sinderby entourage who were present at the castle were Lord and Lady Sinderby, Atticus, Lady Rose and Stowell.  Who else could it have been?  The remainder of the staff worked for Lord Hexham, who owned the castle.

In season 6, when Thomas Barrow goes to Dryden Park to be interviewed by Sir Richard for a new position, Fellowes is showing us an estate which has fallen on hard times.  But the estate is so delapidated that it appears to have been abandoned for a hundred years, not fifteen.  I can't blame Fellowes, however.  In England today there are probably only four kinds of great houses:  houses that have been destroyed (what a shame!), houses that have been abandoned for a century, houses that were abandoned but have been restored, and houses (like Highclere Castle) that were never abandoned.  Finding an estate that looked only slightly run down would have been impossible for him.

Having been a middle-class American all my life, it's tempting to see Fellowes as being snobbish for loving the great houses, but I can't really blame him.  For the people who occupied them, it must have been a glorious existence.  We have our cathedrals to God, and the great houses were our cathedrals to people.  However, it's also true that too much of a good thing is still too much, and I can imagine that many of their occupants weren't very happy.


Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Patmore

In keeping with what I said about the characters being too loving, both Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Patmore are overly solicitous at times.  For example, I got tired of hearing Mrs. Patmore talk about "one-sided loving".  Daisy's crush on Alfred is the type of obsessive behavior that should have worn thin on Mrs. Patmore, not inspired compassion.  In other words, in real life Mrs. Patmore would have become less patient with Daisy's infatuation over time, especially since Alfred never returned the feelings for all the time he was there.  As for Mrs. Hughes, sometimes she reacts to people with impatience and anger, and other times with self-effacing sympathy.  I'd like to see more consistency.  Beyond those complaints, however, I think both characters are well played.


Lady Edith

Lady Edith is not my favorite character on Downton Abbey in the sense that I don't find her admirable or lovable, but she may be the most well-played character in the series.  I'm not saying that the other actors who are doing a perfect job of their characters aren't also good, but there is a depth to the Edith character which few of the other characters have, and Laura Carmichael portrays that depth with a raw vulnerability that is simply remarkable.  I often see trembling or other expressive movements in her face that must be very hard for any actor to achieve.  Carmichael is clearly a talented actor.  (Having said that, I am now watching season 5, and I am getting tired of seeing Edith always in a funk, or weeping.)

*          *          *

As I write this, season 5 is over and season 6 is about to begin.  The thoughts I had at the beginning of the article are stronger than ever:  Downton Abbey is a feel-good fairy tale in which Fellowes periodically (and sometimes clumsily) inserts moments of harsh reality.  In that respect, the series has an identity crisis.  However, despite the overall inconsistencies, it is still a delightful series.  The nuanced acting continues to be a delight to watch.  There's one scene in which Isobel Crawley and Branson are talking at the dinner table.  Isobel asks Branson a question that makes him pause briefly and think, and he makes a perplexed puffing sound with his mouth.  Nuances like that are golden.  It isn't just the dialogue that Fellowes gets right but the mindless sounds and movements that people make when they are talking or thinking.  It's marvelous to watch.

And the fact that the entire series came from Fellowes' pen is also amazing.  In this respect, Fellowes has a lot in common with Shakespeare.  Shakespeare's great genius (among other things) was that he could develop a variety of personalities in each play and give them unique characteristics without making them seem like a homogenous group.  Fellowes has that same genius.  Each character in Downton Abbey seems distinctly different from every other character.  The level of creativity required to achieve that is truly astounding.


Season Six

Most of the above article was written before season 5 had ended.  I'm going to confine most of my comments about season 6 to this section.

Let me start by saying that the romance between Carson and Mrs. Hughes strikes me as implausible.  There was no hint of romance for 4-1/2 seasons, and then all of a sudden -- boom! -- they are in love.  It makes no sense to me.

I found it implausible that Lord Grantham would consider Mary's tryst with Tony (Lord Gillingham) to be evidence that she is an adult and could run the estate's business, or run the country.  Yes, having a week-long tryst is something that a woman would do, as opposed to a girl, but it certainly isn't evidence of maturity or managerial skill.

Mary's blackmailer, Lisa Bevan, was very well cast.  I can't imagine a more evil person.  It's too bad that that story line ended so quickly.

One nitpick:  The Bevan character is so proud and hostile that I doubt she would have allowed herself to be dragged out of Downton by her arm, as Anna did.  A small altercation was in order:  Bevan might have pulled her arm away from Anna, and Anna would have then grabbed her more tightly (something like that).

Lady Mary's romance with Henry Talbot always struck me as odd, not because he was a race-car driver, but because there seemed to be no chemistry between them.  Talbot is yet another of Fellowes' wooden men (mentioned above).

It was entirely out of character, in my view, for the Crawley family to encourage Mary to marry Talbot.  As Mary herself said, everyone should have been against such a marriage.  It is all the more mysterious when Mary caves in and acknowledges that she loves him, since Fellowes never shows us why she loves him.

Bertie Pelham's rejection of Lady Edith when he finds out that Marigold is her daughter strikes me as out of character.  He rejects her because she was (supposedly) dishonest with him, yet Fellowes didn't write the Pelham character to be proud or indignant.  Furthermore, Edith wasn't actually dishonest with him.  She hadn't yet given him her answer, and there was still time for her to tell him about Marigold before she did.

(I haven't yet seen the final episode.)