![]() Like almost all British television shows, the acting is frequently inspired. ![]() ![]() These subplots could have come across as salacious additions to attract a modern audience, but instead, they make the portrayed world of Downton Abbey seem all the more realistic. Since the series is based on an original script, there are elements one wouldn’t normally find in, say, an Edwardian novel adaptation, like the homosexual affair between a servant and a member of the ruling class. The Earl and his American wife (Elizabeth McGovern) have three daughters, none of who can inherit it, so the estate and all its money will pass to a distant cousin. His cousin and his cousin’s son have drowned, leaving the future of Downton Abbey in peril. The series opens with the Earl receiving a telegram about the sinking of the Titanic. In Downton Abbey, Fellowes softens the edges: There are many more likable characters, starting with the master of the house, the Earl of Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville as a benign dictator smart enough to realize that the world is rapidly changing around him. But in Gosford Park, the humor and drama came from the collective cynicism and debauchery of its characters its central theme was that corruption spreads to all the floors of the houses we live in. The show’s creator and head writer, Julian Fellowes, manages to brilliantly portray the lives of 18 main characters, the upstairs and downstairs residents of a stately country house, from the spring of 1912 to the beginning of World War I in 1914.įellowes, also a novelist and a sometime actor, previously wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, so the interconnections of servants and masters in a stately home isn’t new material for him. It’s a juicy soap opera in Edwardian clothing-and that’s not a criticism. It’s easy to see why Downton Abbey, a four-part drama that opens the 40th season of Masterpiece Classic on PBS, was the highest-rated period drama on British television since Brideshead Revisited in 1981.
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