British Comfort Food

Downton Abbey is a television series set on a fictional English estate of the same name. It chronicles the lives of the patrician Crawley family and their servants at the beginning of the twentieth century.

According to Wikipedia, Downton Abbey is a “period drama,” a term used by people who are embarrassed to admit that they are watching a soap opera with corsets. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, as Downton Abbey has all the familiar, soapy elements: betrayal, sex, dead bodies, catty women, unrequited love, etc., etc. This observation isn’t meant to be dismissive. Soap operas aren’t inherently better or worse than any other genre. And by the standards of the genre, Downton Abbey is pretty good. It has decent acting, high production values, and lead writer Julian Fellowes hits just the right notes of the soap genre. I particularly enjoy the mutually destructive, pathological rivalry of the elder Crawley sisters. And no one can deliver a cutting one-liner like Maggie Smith.

After watching the first season, I was reminded of why soap operas are the ultimate achievement of serialized television. The great challenge in serial storytelling is maintaining the interest of the audience for not just hours (as in a film), but for months and even years. Plots must be sustainable over multiple episodes so they can capture viewers for the long-term. The most common technique is to focus on interpersonal – and especially romantic – relationships that viewers can easily connect with. These relationship-centered stories lend themselves to deliberate pacing and slow development over many episodes. There’s the meet-cute moment, like when Matthew Crawley first encounters the lovely Mary, the gradual build-up of the relationship spread out over several episodes, the unrequited sexual tension, and finally the big, romantic kiss during sweeps. But romance is only part of the appeal, and the most successful soaps mix romantic plots with storylines involving betrayal, revenge, or other conflicts. It’s also helpful to have various sub-plots to ensure that the audience does not become bored with any one storyline. Like most soaps, Downton Abbey has a large ensemble cast, so when viewers become bored with Matthew and Mary they can enjoy the scheming Thomas or the rivalry between the Dowager Countess and Matthew’s mother.

The soap opera formula is so effective that even series that are not technically soaps will often adopt soapy sub-plots. More often than not, this means an unrequited romance between two of the main characters (as an example, see X-Files, or Bones, or House, or any drama from the last twenty years). And as entertainment conglomerates have shifted from standalone stories to long-term franchises, the soap opera formula has spread to other media. Every new story has a huge cast and a plot extended across multiple novels, movies, comics, or video games. The soap opera is so mainstream its basic features are taken for granted.

But because the soap opera is so ubiquitous, it’s hard to do anything particularly innovative with the formula. Downton Abbey distinguishes itself from the pack in two ways: setting and social commentary. A pre-WWI English estate is a relatively unusual setting (especially for American audiences), and the series is overflowing with nostalgia for a bygone era of fox hunts and Victorian fashion. The social commentary, on the other hand, focuses on class relations and the role of women in a pre-feminist society. At least in the first season, the treatment of these issues is rather cursory and superficial. The writers want to show the gradual transformation of British society, so there are sub-plots where the youngest Crawley daughter flirts with women’s suffrage and helps a maid find a more respectable job as a secretary. But the series never addresses the roots of social inequality, because to do so the writers would have to acknowledge that the Crawleys are spoiled oafs who’ve coasted through life thanks to their undeserved wealth. So the appeal of the setting – and its adoration of noble privilege – clashes with the attempt to say something meaningful about social change in the twentieth century. At least the social commentary provides a veneer of seriousness that most soaps lack (it’s not just a TV series but a “Masterpiece Classic,” according to PBS).

If Downton Abbey never quite rises above passably entertaining, the blame is mostly due to the lackluster writing rather than the conventions of the soap opera. The soap opera formula is simplistic, but that very simplicity means it can be easily merged with other genres and adapted to the interests of the writer. As an example, The Sopranos possessed many of the typical features of the soap opera (extended plots and sub-plots, large ensemble, an emphasis on relationships), and it successfully combined these features with intelligent social/psychological commentary. If I were to arbitrarily rank Downton Abbey, I’d place it below the best of HBO, but well above the cookie-cutter soaps on network TV. It’s probably on par with Mad Men, another series where nostalgia and social commentary collide.

23 thoughts on “British Comfort Food

  1. I’m sure Caro would disagree … but I think Mad Men is very much hit and miss. It has a few great moments and overall great acting, but the social commentary is often a bit trite and obvious (sexism is bad!). And while the writers are obviously critical of the culture of the period, they also kinda love the period: the clothing, the smoking, the boozing, etc.

  2. Gonna have to disagree on that last part. Mad Men is a way better show. Downtown Abbey is amusing, but especially in Season 2 gets really melodramatic (overly melodramatic for my tastes, at least overly so in a way that doesn’t come back around to again to be interesting like in a Sirk film).

    And I think Richard is overstating the case calling Mad Men “trite and obvious”… I don’t think it boils down to “sexism is bad” or at least not in such a simple way. Giving it that reading is like an 8th grader writing a essay on the theme of some crappy novel they read for class, lacking in nuance and going for simplest of summaries.

  3. The overrated Downton Abbey is drastically compressed shorthand storytelling designed for viewers with short attention spans; the scenes are comprised of brief image and sound bites that flit by in seconds…it is more like an extended trailer for a soap opera than a developed, extended narrative like a “real” soap opera. By that I mean, when one sees a promotional trailer for a film especially nowadays, one can see the entirety of the film represented, one doesn’t actually need to see the film since all of the significant moments are present as spoilers in the ad. Downton Abbey as well presents an illusory exploration of class inequities…of course the 1% are all actually wonderful people, beloved by their servants. !?##!!?*

  4. That’s such a one-dimensional view of Mad Men, Richard. Just because the audience doesn’t see how critical the show is of its slimy, stumbling-towards-humanity characters doesn’t mean that critique isn’t there. The judgment is just not in your face continually. I’m amazed at how popular its been for what a bleak moral outlook it seems to have.

  5. Lord Grantham is conspicuously idealized as a kind of the last of truly noble nobility. Fellows is conscious of the awful implications of his social class but needs us to identify with a character in his social position, just like um… every writer who writes about rich people needs us to. Mistaking his characterization as an actual defense of the aristocracy is kind of a one-note reading. We are supposed to suspend our disbelief.
    A better work by Fellows, in terms of setting, suds and also social commentary is the movie Gosford Park, which is a vicious take-down of the idle rich. Hardly anyone “upstairs” comes out the other end of the movie as anything less than monstrous.

  6. Derik, it was just a quick (and somewhat facetious) comment in response to Noah, not a thesis. I have no desire to write an essay on Mad Men, but if you want to do so, I’d be interested in reading what you have to say. [I’ll concede that I haven’t seen season 2 of Downton, but I’ve heard from several people besides yourself that the show goes downhill, so perhaps Mad Men is superior due to qualitative consistency if nothing else … I still think it’s overrated though].

  7. Besides, Downton is less about the actual struggle between the classes in broad terms than about how the class system affects interpersonal relationships. Judging it as a failure based on its ineptitude in depicting 20th century social inequality (in which case, yeah, it’s certainly inept) is an issue of framing.

  8. I love Downton, by the way. Season 2 dips into ridiculous lapses of taste and/or basic writing (the amnesiac burn victim plotline, MY GOD) but was ultimately rewarding.
    I understand from a brother-in-law in Nottingham that the English are a bit mystified by American fawning over the show. It’s a bit of cheesy boilerplate across the pond, apparently.

  9. Sean- you say it’s a failure of the audience, but why is the audience seemingly missing the point? Unfortunately I’m at work so I can’t respond in any depth, but I don’t believe that Mad Men viewers are too dumb to get it. The characters may be “slimy,” but they’re also incredibly sexy, witty, fashionable, and have lives that are fill with big drama. The show’s moral outlook is garbled.

  10. I agree with a lot of the structural comments around the show – the soap opera appeal, the large ensemble cast, the hyper-compressed storytelling – but I find them all to be positive contributors to rather than mediators of the show’s quality. It’s a popcorn show, to be sure, and the popcorn rhythms are part of the fun.

    I do disagree that the writers haven’t acknowledged the Grantham/Crawley family as spoiled oafs. Maybe I’m simply putting this reading onto the show, but it seems that otherwise likable aristocratic characters are constantly being revealed as blithely unquestioning of their privilege until forced to do so (such as when the Abbey is converted into a hospital). That many (not all) of the servants pledge love and loyalty to the family is as much an imposed social construct as anything else. Part of the appeal in the show for me is watching “good” characters function in a “bad” society and feeling a tension about it that they haven’t been intellectually prepared to sort through. The show is designed for us to bring modern social and political sensibilities to ourselves, supplying a metatextual tension to even otherwise uneventful scenes. In particular, Lord Grantham is shown to be a good-hearted man who is nonetheless an undeserving, spoiled elite who has a number of harmful instincts and beliefs.

    Granted, the show doesn’t go THAT far – the main characters never really lose your sympathy for more than a brief time, and they use the classic tactic of introducing characters even more entitled and oblivious to make the main characters look better by comparison. But I also don’t think the show is nearly as shallow as it’s made out to be here.

    And the amnesiac burn victim plotline was FANTASTIC! It was all tension and no pay-off – I thought it was rather daring, actually.

  11. Richard,

    But slimy people are often also sexy, witty, fashionable, and have lives that are filled with big drama. I don’t see it as the responsibility of the show to make their outsides as ugly as their insides – it’s the responsibility of the audience to parse the complexities of the characters and the complexities of their own responses to the (admittedly entertaining) “bad behavior.” It’s not as if the show doesn’t offer the audience the material to do so – it just doesn’t autocratically direct audience response.

  12. James: I don’t quite cotton to your reading of the show. What is the cutoff point for length of scene or delivery of raw information for a show to be legitimate. Some exchanges are short because the show juggles an ensemble cast. The whole point, the thrill of Downton is the subtext anyway. It’s what isn’t said, what CANNOT be said, that drives the show.

  13. Mad Men is a whole lot more serious than Downton Abbey. The latter is nothing but trashy fun. I highly recommend the first 2 seasons of MM, which is where the show should’ve stopped. During that storyline, Draper’s own manufacturing of an identity paralleled his mastery of commodifying America’s. It’s also relentlessly depressing. Then, the Wolverine problem happens, they want you know everything there is to know about who Draper really is, you’re supposed to increasingly root for him and his ad agency as the show continues. Now, I watch for Joan, which is all I really need in a TV show.

    DA is pretty amazing because of the way it uses a bunch of old problematic tropes for pure entertainment: the most evil of the servants are the ugly woman and sniveling gay man. The dogooder liberal woman is constantly shown to be a fool by the elitist Dowager Countess. The bourgeois cousin is constantly made to feel bad for not acknowledging the rightful place of servants in the society. As he grows into his role of possibly taking over Downton, he begins to appear wiser. Being a servant to this over-the-top honorable family seems like a great gig! I’m sure there’s plenty of other stuff I’m currently forgetting. The show does become a bit tedious in the second season, due to all the melodrama that’s thrown at you (like an action film with no buildup).

  14. “…the most evil of the servants are the ugly woman and sniveling gay man. The dogooder liberal woman is constantly shown to be a fool by the elitist Dowager Countess. The bourgeois cousin is constantly made to feel bad for not acknowledging the rightful place of servants in the society.”

    The show isn’t nearly as one-sided as this. Everything you say is true…but then, the show does quite a bit to make you feel the desperation and alienation that clearly drives Thomas (the gay servant). The Dowager Countess often makes her do-gooder cousin look like a fool (because in many ways she is), but her do-gooder cousin gets the upper hand just as often (because in many ways she isn’t). And Matthew’s learning to be served by servants I thought was a clever bit of business, in that his objection to being served was never about the rights or wrongs of a servant system, but just about his pride as a “self-made” middle class man. It shows him existing as a similar creature of privilege to the Grantham’s, but on a separate level. There’s an irony there I feel like you’re not acknowledging.

    Again, I don’t want to say that Downton Abbey is a spectacularly deep show or anything – it’s primarily a very entertaining and quick-paced soap opera with terrific performances and an appealing aesthetic – but the creators do weave in a level of sophistication and irony above what’s being considered here, I think.

  15. They do problematize the “Thomas as evil” stereotyping, especially in the second season… ditto for the “ugly woman.” In the end, do they really let anyone stay as “evil” excepting perhaps Bates’ wife and the nouveau rich newspaper man (which does reinforce the “noble rich people are better” theme).

  16. What you seem to be forgetting, as far as social comment goes in Downton Abbey is that, more than privilege, we’re witnessing decadence. The times are changing and old aristocratic families are falling like flies. It wasn’t a revolution that did it. What provoked such a change was the evolution brought by Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. In other words: the bourgeois class system substituted the old Medieval social order. In the ancient régime Lord Grantham would have been a warrior quarreling with his neighbours or fighting for his king. The fact that he’s mild-mannered and completely useless (and frustrated) during WWI underlines this.

    If we compare the Earl’s kindness with Sir Richard Carlisle’s ruthlessness we’ll understand that the truly rich and powerful can’t be kind. From this point of view Lord Grantham’s characterization isn’t exactly a compliment.

    Now, why doesn’t the house of Grantham fall like all the others? Because the owner of Downton Abbey married American money. In order to show the inequalities in our society the series should be placed in America and be about Lord Grantham’s father-in-law. This is quite impossible because, as we know, America is a classless society and no one is exploited.

  17. “If I were to arbitrarily rank Downton Abbey, I’d place it below the best of HBO”

    But is it better than Love & Rockets? Haven’t seen the show, but given that you say it has a larger cast it wouldn’t surprise me if it is. On the other hand, Gilbert Hernandez’s work features a large cast and it’s not close to being anything good.

  18. I complain but I still watch it. Then, I watch all kinds of crap. No method of delivering story information or editing technique is bad in and of itself. But the abbreviated way this show is done pretty much precludes depth. And, I’m unimpressed with the handling of the Lord’s brief messing about with the maid and the other cross-class alignments. The whole thing most often feels contrived and rushed.

  19. Certainly, Downton Abbey is guilty of not being a shattering, documentary-style exposition of the horrors and abuses of class inequality (who would’ve thought? power corrupts!); of making the Crawley family — the main focus in a continuing series — not a pack of utter monsters whom the audience could not relate to or sympathize with at all, but flawed folks imperfectly trying to deal with changing economic and societal circumstances.

    To recycle an old comment o’ mine…

    ——————————
    Am reminded again of that friend of critic John Simon, who upon leaving a performance of “Macbeth,” would loudly announce, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Oklahoma!'” Then, exiting a performance of the famed musical, would call out, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Macbeth’!”

    …does it make sense to criticize a gloomy drama by the exact same standards one would a rousing musical? To expect, say, “Where the Wild Things Are” — about as perfect a work as one could ask for — to have the character complexity, sweeping portrait of a society, the range of humanity, of a “War and Peace”?
    ——————————

    There are plenty of soap-opera-ish elements in Downton Abbey, but it’s not just soap opera; indeed, the larger canvas upon which the figures appear — and which motivates many of the characters’ actions — are the slow breaking down of class distinctions, accelerated after WW I.

    There are attempts by “downstairs” characters to rise above their servile state, and go into more independent lines of work: the maid becoming a typist/secretary; the chauffeur moving back to Ireland to be a journalist; even the conniving Thomas attempts to break into business, with an ill-fated try at selling black-market food.

    Of the wealthy women family members, some chafe at their position; no longer satisfied with being decorative objects occupying themselves with trivialities. Lady Sybil finds her nursing job important, fulfilling, and resents leaving it; her sister Edith “uses her driving skills to work on a local farm driving tractors” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Downton_Abbey_characters# ), which she greatly enjoys…

    ——————————-
    Jason Michelitch says:

    …In particular, Lord Grantham is shown to be a good-hearted man who is nonetheless an undeserving, spoiled elite who has a number of harmful instincts and beliefs.
    ——————————-

    Yes; for instance, he can be quite the hypocrite, outraged over a daughter’s taking up with the chauffeur and romantically attracted to a housemaid himself. Resentful over the way the house’s being employed as a military hospital intrudes upon their lives.

    While not shown as monstrous, the Crawleys are hardly idealized, either. His wife Cora is an oblivious ditz; Maggie Smith’s Violet Crawley gets in many a good line, but is an utter reactionary…

    ——————————
    Jason Michelitch says:

    …Matthew’s learning to be served by servants I thought was a clever bit of business, in that his objection to being served was never about the rights or wrongs of a servant system, but just about his pride as a “self-made” middle class man.
    ——————————-

    Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom points out how, paradoxically, rigidly-stratified societies (whether it’s by caste or class) can be more comforting that fluidly malleable ones, where you’re not sure where you stand, what life-upheaving changes tomorrow might bring. Sure, you’re stuck in your place with little chance to break out, but you’ve got a place, yours for life, with ways to make your living ready-made. And there is often great freedom of action and behavior within one’s “place.”

    And being a servant was in those times a substantially better “deal” than many other lines of work. With those in that position appreciating what “perks” came of it; often proud of their place (Matthew’s valet hurt, being made to feel useless, by the “master” insisting on dressing himself all by his lonesome). Even if to modern eyes their position appears hopelessly degraded.

    A co-worker once mentioned he found the idea of waiting tables unappealingly servile; I loved waitering, myself. Bringing people delicious food; anticipating their needs, and unobtrusively fulfilling them; the show-biz aspects of gracefully presenting dishes and pouring wine, helping create a beautiful dining experience.

    I’d have made a great servant! Watching the “historical reality” series The Edwardian Country House ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edwardian_Country_House ), was furious and frustrated with the spoiled, lazy young moderns working “below stairs,” who couldn’t realize that in those days, people in their class would’ve given their eyeteeth for such cushy, sheltered jobs. Loved and empathized with Hugh Edgar, who was the butler, seriously trying to live up to his role, and frustrated by the slacker spirit of those under him.

    ——————————-
    james says:

    …the abbreviated way this show is done pretty much precludes depth. And, I’m unimpressed with the handling of the Lord’s brief messing about with the maid and the other cross-class alignments. The whole thing most often feels contrived and rushed.
    ——————————-

    Yes, those are indeed substantial flaws. Unlike a traditional-style, 5-days-a-week soap opera, the show has but a limited amount of time in its abbreviated “seasons,” with substantial gaps of time between, necessitating that most issues must be resolved in one story arc. The writer/producers (who don’t know how many seasons they are to have, and time to play with) choosing to cram a lot of plot in a tight time frame.

  20. Downton Abbey is like an abridgement of a good story. If you’ve ever read or listened to an abridgement of a novel you always feel that something is missing. Yes, you get the major plot points, but it doesn’t breathe and doesn’t move you. There is no naturalness to the dialogue at Downton or to the scenes depicted…every scene is designed to show a particular point..and usually to reinforce an already obvious conclusion about a character. There is very little ambiguity…the writer underlines exactly what the scene is all about. Most scenes are obvious and uninteresting and have virtually no interesting subtext. The drama should flow out of and be embedded in the day-to-day lives of the characters. Instead we jump from a dramatic revelation to a short scene showing that character A continues to be noble or character B continues to be conniving…or that the daughters are becoming more independent. It feels, as someone noted above, as if the writer and producers are scared to death that the viewers will have a short attention span and will be bored. There is a lack of depth to the characters and the viewer is left with almost no understanding of who these people really are. Why are they acting the way they are? It’s actually shocking to stop and think about how little complexity each of the characters has. Each character begins as a type and stays a type…and even the revelations, for example the revelation about Mr. Carson’s background, seem too easily concocted and don’t really resonate…because we don’t really get to know Mr. Carson in any day-to-day way. A writer with confidence and something to say wouldn’t be so worried that we’d get bored by the mundane. I’m bored by the potboilers and cardboard cutout characters. Two episodes into Season 2 I’m throwing in the towel.

  21. Pretty on-target criticisms!

    But, there’s lots of period “eye candy”; a major bonus for some of us…

  22. “MAD MEN” has its flaws, but it’s still ten times better than “DOWNTON ABBEY”.

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