Why America Fell In Love With 'Downton Abbey'

When Downton Abbey premiered in the United States in January 2011, it was just another entry in PBS’ Masterpiece schedule. It had premiered earlier in Britain, where it got good-not-great reviews (the Brits thought they recognized a frothy spot of bother in the backyard of their own history, thankew veddy much). It arrived in America at a time when Masterpiece Theatre was going through an identity crisis, trying to boost its ratings by splitting into subdivisions such as Masterpiece Mystery and Masterpiece Contemporary — the latter as foolish a re-branding as Coca-Cola’s New Coke. Little did PBS know that it wasn’t re-branding it needed at all; what was necessary for a resurgence was something buried deep in the very roots of the network: a lively soap opera whose mix of upstairs posh and downstairs cook-and-wash would hit the spot for American Anglophiles in a way no other PBS entry had done since Upstairs Downstairs, the ur-Downton from the mid-1970s whose co-creator and co-star, Jean Marsh, once accused Downton of ripping off.

Downton creator Julian Fellowes was, in 2011, a British writer who had already won an Oscar for another bit of canny Anglo-angel-food-cake for American audiences: his script for Gosford Park, a Robert Altman-directed Agatha Christie-style murder mystery with a cast that included the future Countess Dowager, Maggie Smith.

During his show’s premiere season, Fellowes told The New York Times that the wisest thing he’d done was “that we treat the characters of the servants and the family exactly the same. Some of them are nice, some of them are not nice, some of them are funny, some of them are not, but there is no division between the servants and the family to mark that.”

This is true to an extent. Certainly viewers could feel more immediate warmth for servants such as the fussy-jolly Mrs. Patmore than the ice-queeny Lady Mary. But as much as Americans like to think of themselves as bound to no class and always capable of moving up in the world, the truth is that our fantasies often involve living in a big house with lots of leisure time and plenty of lesser people around to lord it over. Many Americans also have an inferiority complex about the British, admiring and envying what we hear as their superior vocabularies and experience as their stiff-upper-lip sangfroid in any situation.

And thus this country fell for the stern-but-fair authority of Robert Crawley, the Lord Grantham, and became enthralled by the sisterly relationships of Ladies Mary, Edith, and (sniff) Sybil. Downstairs, the travails of the valet John Bates and his mousy mate the maid Anna provided romantic drama before descending into tedious melodrama (really, would Anna never be happy?). And Fellowes was extremely wise to create, in the butler Mr. Carson a parallel-world authority figure equal, in his downstairs way, to Lord Grantham.

Towering over all by stooping so low has been Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, who has acted as the series’ internal critic, puncturing pretension and hypocrisy with her waspish wit. The Dowager Countess is at once a ridiculous figure (a caricature of a snob) and a wonderfully lovable scamp in beautiful clothing — as portrayed so well by Maggie Smith, she is Downton Abbey’s Everywoman/Everyman, the one character whose point of view every viewer can share with glee.

Sure, Downton has had its uneven plot-lines, and even uneven seasons, but Julian Fellowes, who wrote all the scripts, maintained a narrative drive that carried us past the dull patches.

When it premiered, the most esteemed American TV shows on the air were Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Downton Abbey seemed like something completely different, but it wasn’t: Like those American shows, this import offered a picture of a culture in slow, steady decline, colored by often bleak, dark humor yet filled with characters we cared about. It will leave us on Sunday night with many viewers weeping — with sadness and gratitude — into their cups of tea.

Downton Abbey concludes its series run Sunday night on Masterpiece on PBS. Check your local listings.