Downton Abbey

Not sure if Maclaine has been earmarked for Season 4 or not.

— Alan

I had a bad feeing when I read that one of the characters didn’t want to renew his contract. Then I watched the most recent Christmas special.

Oh Downton…

Seriously, spoiler that for folks watching on PBS in the States. I know what you’re talking about, but it’s spoileriffic for those who may not know.

I think my time with Downton Abbey with start and end with season 3.

I looked up the spoiler

That was my favorite character. I kind of noticed the spoiler a few weeks ago when I was reading Wikipedia and saw the character ended at season 3. I didn’t think they’d be able to kill him off that fast, so I thought I was safe as of the last episode. Really stupid.

I liked a lot of of the series. But at least once per episode they really lay it on thick like a TV show. They want to make sure you don’t miss the message or new drama for that episode. It’s ruins the rest of it a bit.

The death earlier in the season was a little too grim for me too.

I don’t think I like enough of the remaining characters to watch it next season. But my wife will probably keep up with it. Maybe I’ll get sucked back in.

Well, now we can talk about that!

Like I said months ago, nothing ever happens easily to these people. Yeesh.

And I saw this idea posted on the AVClub’s forums, but the best thing to happen to Downton next season is we fast forward to the 60s, Downton has been sold to new money rock & roll stars, and we get an aged Thomas as the new Mr Carson trying to teach these young hellions proper table manners.

I was pretty pissed off when I first saw the episode, although you can just sort of feel that everything’s too content, and it’s fairly ominous…

And of course I’ve read the circumstances behind what took place, and I guess I’m forced to agree with Julian Fellowes. Once that hand was dealt to him as a writer and series creator, there was really no other way to resolve things than what he did.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one in a season is a tragedy, but to lose two in a season looks like carelessness.

They did do everyone a favor by …

This spoiler brought to you by a grant from Darlene Shiley

[spoiler]… having the camera linger lovingly on the corpse to establish that he’s not merely dead but really most sincerely dead. This saves the Interwebs a long and fruitless debate about whether his Wolverine regeneration powers will bring him back for season 4.

Though given the way Downton rolls, I will not be surprised if season 5 comes around and we discover that he has an identical twin brother with an eyepatch living in South America.[/spoiler]

I think they should have just replaced him and left the character alive. There will be enough depression coming next season, I expect.

Would’ve been pretty ridiculous if they’d done that.

It allows for some new romantic intrigue eventually, so that could be interesting. We still have an heir in place so no obscure relative will be swooping down, though that could have been fun – imagine some distant cousin from America, a real country bumpkin, using a toothpick after dinner.

I wonder if the ultimate story arc of the show is to follow Downton through to the end of WWII and the growth of socialism in England that put an end to most of the great estates?

People would have hated that… actor replacements of super-popular shows never goes well unless it’s a soap opera.

Oh, right. Well… DA is more than just a soap opera. So there you go :)

— Alan

This has to be one of the toughest life decisions for an actor: whether to leave a popular show or not. You never know if you can make it bigger. There are numerous examples of both results.

From my desk chair here across the Atlantic, it doesn’t seem like it would’ve been that hard for him to stay one more season. But what do I know?

I saw him on Broadway recently - that’s where he sees his career going, Broadway rather than film or TV. He was decent enough, though not outstanding.

It may be that he just likes the stage better. It’s a very different experience than performing for a camera. I played Orlando in As You Like It in college, and there’s a certain energy in playing in front of an audience.

Oh okay. Something I read said he’d be in a Liam Neeson movie so I figured he wanted to be a film star.

Apparently Fellowes held out hope until the last that he could be coaxed back, which also may have contributed to the rather abrupt story piece.

Movie/tv actors almost always dabble in broadway. Take a look at an/off broadway and who does a 3 month gig. It’s very commmon and doesn’t mean he’s choosing the boards over tv/film. Theatre is the actor’s medium while tv/film is the director’s medium…

Enjoy DA still but not more b/c it’s a couple activity than I think it’s great drama. Agree with the decision to kill off Matthew once he was leaving, but it’s disappointing. Whole series is a bit grim as it’s celebrated a doomed lifestyle.

I’m up in the air about Season 3. The stakes were higher than ever this season, and that was never anything but obvious. Fellowes did good work closing out the prison arc with Mr. Bates, who is still acted with a slightly sinister air. (Was there ever confirmation of domestic violence in his past?) Nevertheless, something about this third installment of Downton simply missed the mark.

If the problems upstairs were weightier, and the acting often excellent, the problems downstairs seemed trivial, and not just by comparison. For the most part, the stories made little sense in the context of what we’ve seen before. Some characters even lost depth as the season progressed, reduced to props (Alfred and Ivy), or else mere tropes (Carson and Molsely). Fellowes also apparently bent over backwards to underline the point that housemaids are a dime-a-dozen: their only purpose is to sing a siren song so that we can better contemplate a male character.

Part of the problem may be that the show built two particular story threads that couldn’t be effectively resolved without serious dislocation to everything else. The first has to do with Branson, who can’t free Ireland from the Downton Abbey dining room. He did, however, go from annoyingly strident and self-centered to surprisingly genteel in far too little time. The seduction storyline wasn’t very compelling either. The show is at its best when characters talk around the table, but the dinner in the servants’ hall was really just a cut scene. The second, and larger issue, was Matthew and Mary, who for the first few episodes seemed not to work well as a married couple. That raised some intriguing questions about the nature of their attraction, as well as of their maturity – first Matthew’s as he grappled with the inheritance, then Mary’s as she struggled to reconcile values inherited from her father with those held by her husband. It was especially interesting to see Mary convincingly dress down Lord Grantham for his stance on scandal while still failing to forgive Matthew much less egregious errors.

I found the treatment of the servants this season largely flat. An attempt was seemingly made to mirror what was going on upstairs, complete with Carson as Lord Grantham and Mrs. Hughes as Lady Grantham. The newcomers, first Alfred, then Jimmy-James, became less interesting as the season wore on. Jimmy-James never quite turned into the ladies’ man, while Alfred suddenly gained fixed views on homosexuality and the courage to act on them. Ivy was simply an objective over which to be fought. Molsely was reduced entirely to comic relief. Thomas received some good attention, culminating in a (largely successful) attempt to make him more sympathetic. He had one of the most powerful and perhaps best-acted scenes of the whole series in rebuking Carson’s opinion of him, and indeed of homosexuals in general. His detente with Jimmy-James, while unconventional, is very interesting, and seems to speak to a conclusion on his part that it is now impossible to find more than a limited happiness. But why pick a fight he couldn’t win with O’Brien? The original pretext was vaguely convincing, given what we knew already about his character–generally resentful of those “handed” their meal ticket–except we never heard anything about it again after that from his side, while O’Brien’s plotting escalated to the point of being excessive even for her.

When Downton first came out I saw it as a looking glass into the radically changing social landscape in Britain around the turn of the century. The sinking of the Titanic seemed to me a marker in the show for the ending of the “old ways.”

Throughout the first season we started seeing things that were peeking through the cracks–a maid aspiring to be a secretary (not minding her place, or worse, leaving --service–), a gay footman who kept it on the sly…but not quite --that-- sly, the idea from Branson that nobility weren’t being looked at in quite the same light as had previously been the case.

The third season seems to have throttled some of that exposition. Mention is made of Suffrage, but it never really takes a scene, just a scene-sideline. The closest thing I recall to really reflecting the changing times were 1) the economic changes that were destroying all the great houses that didn’t recognize the threat and modernize and 2) the fact that the Earl very clearly could no longer count on the women-folk obeying his decrees. Also, the issue with the doctors outlined the shift from nobles going with noble/famed personages rather than competence, and the shift away from that.

These were both big things, to be sure. But I’d gotten so used to seeing it from the commoner point of view–the changes happening downstairs, out of view of the nobles as they changed their clothes four times a day and went from event to event–that it seemed jarring to not have as much happening there from a sociological point of view.

Desert, is that kind of the take you had?

I’m rarely sensitive to “deeper meanings,” and it didn’t become obvious to me that Downton could be read as an intentional allegory on the conflict between tradition and modernity until it was explicitly called out by Lord Grantham himself at the beginning of this season. I had been enjoying the show purely as a period piece that told compelling stories about (mostly) sympathetic characters.

I agree with you that Season 3 kicked the allegory into high-gear, although, looking back, it hasn’t exactly been hiding. In fact, if I remember correctly, the Season 2 trailer did promise that the trials of the Great War would change Downton forever. Ironically, I think that they succeeded only in changing it for a season, since everything had wrapped up neatly by the end. The major loss was William, who was forgettable inasmuch as he pined for a young lady who never returned his romantic affections.

My complaints with Season 3 have to do with (A) the increasing obviousness, even stock flavor, of the tropes, which have threatened to reduce some characters to one dimension; (B) the use of certain theoretically “major” cast members (e.g., Ivy, Jimmy-James) simply to make others go; © over-dependence on a single strategy, the pretty housemaid, to drive storylines downstairs.

That said, I enjoy complaining, and I complained all the way to the end of the season, without missing an episode, so good job all around.

Season 4 premiered yesterday. Haven’t watched it yet. Do I want to? Sigh… I guess.

— Alan