My grandmother has been watching British television for as long as I can remember. Her show of choice is, and has always been Coronation Street. She knows the characters and even has a massive book detailing the history of the show; a show that has been running for over fifty years has quite a bit of history to cover, by the way. Despite the fact that every decade or so the cast gets changed up I’ve never been able to dig in. For the same reason that I’ll never take it upon myself to go back and watch all of the pre-2005 Doctor Who episodes I will never go back and watch all of Coronation Street.
Then, all of a sudden, Twitter exploded with talk of this show called Downton Abbey. A show based just past the turn of the century, set in the titular English estate and host to the aristocratic family and cadre of servants who live and work there – that sounded awfully boring, honestly. As I tried to form a thought picture of what the show could be, based on the tids and bits I picked up from Twitter I wound up settling on the idea that it was a cross between a British drama and a faux-documentary: something like the failed ABC show My Generation, but posh Brits instead of shitty teenagers.
The idea that I had concocted in my head seemed so unbearably terrible that I couldn’t help but check it out. So, bracing myself for disappointed, I dove in to the first episode.
I was not overwhelmed.
The first episode of Downton Abbey is too much to take in. It immediately hits you with all the information required to follow the rest of the show, of which there is a lot. The members of the family and the first issue they’re faced with, namely locating a new heir to the entire estate due to the apparent death of the current heir because of the sinking of the Titanic. That in itself is difficult enough to swallow: it’s a show rooted in reality but with a concept so foreign to the audience of today it can’t help but be a touch confusing. Layered on top of that, however, is the entire cast of characters that when combined creates the servants of the family, and soon after you’ve barely been given enough time to work out which servant is which it introduces a light dose of the politics happening between them.
The first time I watched the first episode I came away from it almost at a loss. I didn’t dislike it, exactly. It just didn’t seem to grab me as much as it seemed it should have. What I failed to realize right away though is that time is passing rather quickly with no mention of it one way or another. Days, or even weeks seem to pass during the first episode, but with the way the show is put together it happens quite fluidly. It’s a key point to keep in mind in order to follow along without feeling lost in the sea of information contained within the show.
Once I had realized that I began watching the next episodes, and by the end of the second episode it had deep, deep hooks in me. Before I knew it days had passed and I had seen all sixteen episodes, and the feelings of anticipation and irritation waiting months on end for shows like Sons of Anarchy to air again had manifested.
When you watch a lot of science fiction and fantasy programs the novelty of an entirely different world fades quickly. Those worlds, while quite different from the world we live in aren’t normally the point of those shows – they are strange settings to allow the strange events required to make the stories work a possibility. This is a show set in the world we live in, set barely a hundred years ago and it is more of a foreign world than any of those. Had my family not moved from Ireland two generations ago there is a very real possibility my grandparents could have been working in a house like this, and that notion is odder than the idea of ships moving across galaxies faster than light, or sliding between parallel dimensions, or having a body made out of rubber.
I don’t have a question to ask you guys this week. Downton Abbey has done what very few things can make me do: it has put me into a state of deep contemplation. All I can say is that, if possible, you must watch it.
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