Up with Downton… by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

January 4, 2012 Whitney Farmer 12 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an M.B.A, and is planting a garden.

New Year Resolutions can wait…

This Sunday, Season Two of “Downton Abbey” returns to Masterpiece Classic on PBS!

With all of the froth of messy human problems but set amongst the beginnings of the first of the World’s Wars, the British goldmine has put the ‘opera’ back in soap opera. The first season began as an aristocratic British family learns that the male heir to their family estate has died in the sinking of the Lusitania. Because of inheritance laws, it causes a series of challenges for a family that had given birth to only females. Now, the oldest daughter has to be persuaded to marry a stranger who happens to be a distant relative in order for the wealthy family to not be rendered homeless at the death of the patriarch.  The handsome stranger who is a relative isn’t overly thrilled with the scheme either.

Such is the beginning of all great bodice-ripping novels that we pretend we don’t like. But the story transcends to more as it introduced Americans to the alien world of aristocracy. A nation of mutts, the most foreign aspect of our former mother country is the concept of those born into a stratum who are shamed with the idea of work, compared with their servants whose lives are absorbed into others because of a happenstance of birth.

Masterpiece Classic, formerly Masterpiece Theatre, has created a legacy of rich programming for 40 years.  From the math, I am one of their first customers. My sisters and I were introduced to “The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth” on Sunday nights, curled up in pajamas with blankets in front of a black and white teevee on our living room floor. This was followed by “Elizabeth the Queen” with Glenda Jackson. “I, Claudius” scared me, but I could feel myself getting smarter by the minute. I graduated to “Jewel in the Crown” soon after I left Tarzan and Rudyard Kipling, nurturing my love of India which soon led to my reading Jawaharlal Nehru’s important “Story of India”. My sister Holley and I used to stay up late to watch “Flambards” because one of the leading males fed our shared crush on Freddie Mercury of Queen. No, we had no idea that it was impossible that our love would be reciprocated. “The Buccaneers” introduced Carla Gugino pre-“Sin City” with a layer of baby fat that got left behind when she went Hollywood.

I had assumed that I was the only one in L.A. watching “Downton Abbey” last season. But on the accurately maligned morning news show “Good Day L.A.”, (a cause for embarrassment that the City of Angels just can’t quit), ADHD-infused anchor Jillian Barberie squealed with delight when she announced to viewers that she had just received the box set of the first season.  Sweet natured but prone to putting on makeup and reading magazines while tweeting while On Air, the “Skating with the Stars” alum with a pro athlete divorce in her past represents the truth of “Downton Abbey”’s success: It’s a good story that has captured a REALLY broad viewership for all the right reasons.

The first season of “Downton Abbey” won 5 million U.S. viewers to add to the 9 million in Britain who counted the hours between episodes last year. Ending as the beginning of World War I was announced, this season’s story promises to dish up hearty entertainment. The world now is very different, with even the rules of aristocratic inheritance beginning to change in Britain with the recent legislation making the firstborn of either sex of Prince William and Kate heir to the throne. But eternal truths will still present: We will want the heroine to be spunky, even if wounded. We will want the hero to be intrigued but uncompromising. We will want obstacles to true love that will stir the fires of passion. We will want great villains and great clothes and great rooms and great wars.

All that’s needed is the comic book.

DC Presents: DA…

—

Quote of the Blog, from Ed, Dude of Light and Fog: “Fame and fortune are incompatible. As soon as you get famous, everyone takes your fortune.”