Hooked

Okay, I was hooked throughout six seasons on Downton Abbey.  Yes it was, till the end, a bit of a soap opera.  Normally, I hate or can’t remain with soaps, The Good Wife an example.  There were moments in past seasons when I got close to abandoning ship, questioned whether I could make it into or through the next episode.  Something kept me.   No it wasn’t perfect and some have suggested suffered from having a single writer — Julian Fellowes — throughout.  Excuse me, Lord Julian Fellowes.  How fitting. 

Well it’s all over now, perhaps.  He’s musing about a film.  All of us loyal viewers, here and in the UK from whence it came undoubtedly have our favorite characters even some that we’ve learned to love or empathize with — Thomas.  Many found Lady Mary cold and imperious.  I always saw her as caught up in the must be or should be, the one on who bore the burden of carrying on, which is what Brits across classes are expected to do, like it or not.  Just, the way we do things around here.

Downton took the Crawley’s through the halcyon early 20th century days, though the “Great War” and into that transitional period before the twin shocks of a Depression and World War II.  Fellowes opted not to take us beyond 1925.  One can’t help but wonder how they would have weathered what was to come.  It probably wasn’t necessary because the series basic story, or perhaps message, had already been told.  For me, it was summed up in the last spoken lines of the two most senior and emblematic family members: Isobel and the Dowager Violet Crawley.  These two women played by great actors (and friends) Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith express Downton’s core tension better than all others.  “We’re going to the future not back to the past,” Isobel says.  To which a resigned but deeply disappointed Violet replies, “If only we had the choice”.

Their summary exchange is set against New Years Eve, our annual celebration of the future that Isobel embraces, and that Violet would be happy to forgo.   In the end Downton is all about that tension — holding on to the known way and being pulled toward and adapting to change.  It plays in the first decades of the nineteen-hundreds but still resonates powerfully almost a century on.  It’s the same tension we are witnessing close up in the harshness and crosscurrents of our current politics.  The days of places and practices like Downton may be behind us in the literal sense.  Moreover, we don’t see them as part of the American experience.  But is that true?  Downton is all about two worlds that rarely intersect, certainly not on equal terms.  Even their basic calendars are out of sync as tokened when Violet, in an earlier season, bewilderingly asked cousin Mathew, “What is a weekend?”  The 1%, to put in modern terms, has always lived in a totally different place and still does.

We are not of them, but they do fascinate us.  It wasn’t only the British who were besotted by Princes Diana and now yearn for glimpses into the lives of Kate and William.  It may mystify us that those most neglected by people like him have made Donald Trump their hero, insisting that he understands and cares for them.  It shouldn’t.  We have long misread such connections with the ultra successful or wealthy born, perhaps hoping that something of them — their good fortune — might rub off on us.  At the very least, we can, if only for the moment, live vicariously in their lives.  I’d guess (with no research to back it up) that viewers of Downton more likely identified with Robert and his Crawley’s than with Carson’s cohort below ground.  Their story was primary, while the characters in service, albeit likeable and sympathetic, played the perennial supporting role.  We may have wanted more for them, but honestly were more engaged with Edith’s struggles, in rooting for her “success” as if anyone could need more than even the most “deprived” Crawley.  When Anna gives birth in Mary’s bed at the series end, our minds were yelling “yes”, but somehow we knew that it was out of sync with the Downton way.  A gift of the moment that shouldn’t be read as a precedent, as settled law.

We pride ourselves on living in an egalitarian democracy where at least some of us can reach beyond the bounds of our origins.  Examples of rags to riches, figuratively or literally, abound.  We also know that for most people, opportunity is more a hollow dream or myth than a reality.  That has long been the case.  Perhaps we don’t have Lords and Ladies, but we certainly have a stratified society.  The Billionaire Class against whom Bernie Sanders rails is not new, nor is their role.  The late Ann Richards famously spoke of George Bush’s silver foot in his mouth, and Mitt Romney seemed tone deaf as to how most of us live.  But both Roosevelts were born to and lived in wealth, something that enabled Jack Kennedy to move further and faster than he might have as, say, the son of a Boston cab driver.   I’ve know people who were brought up by nannies — the way of the Crawley family — and who somehow always remained detached from or bemused by mothers, not to mention fathers, changing diapers.  President Obama has said that he will particularly miss Air Force One when he leaves office.  That special privileged existence is alluring and even modern day Horatio Alger types quickly get accustomed to a rarified and separated Downton life, even if updated slightly for a different time.  John McCain couldn’t remember how many houses he and his wife owned and I'm sure Michael Bloomberg has lost count.  

Why was Downton Abbey such a success?  It spoke to the continuing struggle between past, present, and future.  It was dated only in setting.  Somehow, and that’s true for so much of fiction written or performed, we knew those people.  Perhaps it would be a stretch to say we identified with them, but if not collectively we found parts of them individually within ourselves.  Was there anything to be admired in the ways of either upstairs or downstairs?  Absolutely not, much of it was deplorable.  But calm down.  It was only a television program, a bit of engaging playacting.  And you know what, writing about it is a very refreshing departure from commenting on that latest news from our deplorable election campaign.  I don’t know about you, but this blogger badly needed a break.

Dear Abbey.

Time to bid another farewell but not a goodbye to the Grantham’s and Downton. They'll be back for yet another season.  When season three began, 7.9 million viewers tuned in, a record for PBS.  The Brits have delivered for us again.  Of course, its pedigree and prestigious American address notwithstanding, Downton Abbey is a classic soap opera.  There are definitely times when one thinks, "Can’t believe I'm watching this".  And of course Downton is not only a soap opera but a derivative one at that.  Each episode builds on the tone and themes, if not storyline, established in BBC's 1970s Upstairs Downstairs, also shown here on PBS.  That saga's smaller but also grand 165 Eaton Place has been "reopened" with new owners in an updated version — 9 new episodes so far — clearly aimed to piggyback on its emulator's success.  It's all rather incestuous, wouldn't you say?

What is it exactly that has gotten so many of us hooked on the Grantham family and their cohabiting servants?  For one, the story is well spun; for another it is very well acted.  Yes the residents of Downton live in a vastly different world than our own, but ultimately these are human beings with aspirations and characteristics that transcend any given time, place or class.  Moreover, we're watching a series that has sufficient airtime to allow for character development and, not inconsequentially, neither our train of thought nor theirs is interrupted by commercial messages.  Ah the joys of public TV.  If you're not sending in your yearly support, shame on you.  The absence of commercial interruption is equally appreciated by viewers of HBO created series and most recently of Netflix's excellent House of Cards.

The Downton characters are developing and we, as is the case in any well-told story, are both engrossed and invested in them.  We're rooting for the still unfulfilled hopes evident both upstairs and down.  We could not help but be moved by the untimely loss of Sybil, in many ways the most courageous and interesting of the Grantham sisters.  We wait with bated breath to see the impact next time around of what's happened to Mathew, Downton's great young hope.  And while alas few of us have a figure like Dame Maggie Smith in our own families, we so wish we had one of her ilk around if only to observe the show of it.

Okay, Downton is good TV, but again what makes it so compelling?  For me the real pull of the show is the underlying theme that runs through, the fundamental question that is both timely and timeless.  Right there on display is the tension filled struggle between past and future.  It is a struggle that makes at times for a very awkward present.  It rings so true because we both know and live it.  Issues of class play at Downton much as they do in our own day.  But let's not be simplistic about it.  Holding on to yesterday, then and now, is something found across the economic strata.  Clearly, the tug of war within the Grantham' family has its mirror image in Carson's realm and in both cases it is mostly generational.  That said, age and generation is not always as decisive a factor as mindset — older people can be very progressive, young ultra-conservative.

Looking at our own social and political landscape, our Dear Abbey if you will, there may be no more fundamental issue at hand than past vs. future.  There is also nothing more ferocious than an aging animal (physically or mentally) faced with being supplanted by a vigorous forward thinking youth.  That's especially true when the pretender has a different look, background or way.  The Downton syndrome plays out before us today as people of waning power and yesterday's ideology face, for example, a president who doesn't look or talk like them.  Tomorrow-focused people may show respect, but tend not to accept what is or has been as a given.  They question and they ultimately demand change.  Lord Grantham is unnerved by both.  He sees the quality of his performance challenged and his hold on the reigns undermined.  Isn't that what all change is about and why is so resisted? Passing the baton is always painful, at the very least bittersweet.

It was only days ago that Pope Benedict announced, relative to the Church we know, his unprecedented abdication.  It sent shock waves around the world and only now are the Catholics and others beginning to focus on the ideological fallout.  Among the principal issues his move raises is the nature of the papacy itself, most especially the notion of infallibility.  Remember popes aren't merely absolute monarchs they are also seen as God's infallible representative here on earth.  It gives them truly extraordinary powers.  Leaving aside celibacy and the absence of family life in the traditional sense, there is a strong element of Downton in the Roman Church.  It is an archaic Downton bound by traditions of the past — in large measure still living in the past — with still vast but no longer totally secure resources.  

To be sure Rome is being challenged by its immediate and still unresolved scandals, to be charitable moral lapses.  But the real issue they and, while differently, other traditional religious groups face is how to bridge what was with what must be if they are to sustain.  Their problem, and make no mistake equally ours, is how to let go and move on.  Easier said than done especially when so many, perhaps a huge majority, are mired in or, perhaps lest judgmentally, reverent of what for so long was.  When your arteries are clogging up with very tasty butter rich fare, it's hard to embrace a much altered diet.  Very tough but in the end your survival depends on it. 

We all know Lord and Lady Grantham.  We know their children and perhaps mostly we know the world down below, the one with the greatest stake in change and moving forward.  Downton's world may still be in the early twentieth century but it translates fluidly in the twenty-first.  We're all living it at this moment.

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My book Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars is now available in print and as an eBook.  Both versions are available at Amazon; the electronic iBooks version can be found at iTunes; a Nook version at Barnes & Noble.