Downton is back, but the end is near. We have arrived at episode two of the sixth and final season. Unless, of course, the desire for more revenue conquers restraint. Already the show has run far longer than originally intended. It was meant to follow the fortunes of Downton from the sinking of the Titanic through the 1920s.
The second season had covered two-thirds of that period, but the show’s popularity persuaded the suits to stretch it out for four more seasons. If shameless padding is good enough for “The Hunger Games” and Hobbits, why not a “Masterpiece?” Besides, it isn’t as if the PBS cash-cow franchise is up there with Austen or Wharton. It’s always been closer to a soap opera or telenovela, just with superior costumes, sets and accents. Instead of bodice ripping it traffics in more decorous bodice fluttering.
Downton’s popularity surely proves that every little girl wants to be a princess when they grow up. Failing that, when they do grow up and face reality, they’ll still settle for imagining themselves a minor aristocrat, living in a huge, entailed estate where they can do nothing all day, other than exploit servants and tenants.
Yes, the show takes us below stairs for sentimental melodrama featuring true-blue Bates and Anna, Carson and Mrs. Hughes. Mrs. Patmore and Daisy and the transparently weaselly Thomas Barrow and Miss O’Brien, but the hearts of the audience remain upstairs with the toffs.
Though we had a revolution to get rid of the idea of hereditary power, nobility, aristocracy, we have never really gotten over the notion. We still go gag over the royals, thrill to the exploits of the monied and celebrated, and live in McMansions on streets named for English shires. Ye Gods, a crooked Congressman billed the taxpayers $40,000 to have his office decorated in Downton style, clearly picturing himself in the House of Lords and regarding his constituents as members of the servant class..
Yet viewed objectively, the Earl of Grantham and his chattel are an astonishingly hapless crew. Over six seasons they have made a solid case for chucking the social structure that permitted Downton to exist and allowing people like Matthew Crawley, the lawyer son of a Manchester doctor, and Tom Branson, the chauffeur, to take charge of the country.
Consider the hidebound, clueless patriarch, an incompetent booby who has failed to keep up with the times and has brought the estate to the brink of bankruptcy. He has lost the money of his American heiress wife in stupid stock speculation and has resisted any innovations proposed by his low-born sons-in-law. He also can’t seem to detect the rotten, disloyal servants in his employ, nor can the butler and housekeeper to whom he has delegated power.
The most disappointing Downton character is the Lord’s Lady, Cora. You’d think the wealthy daughter of an American robber baron would have also inherited a bit of the canniness and get up and go that produced her fortune. But rather than get the Earl to wise up and save the place, she spends her time cleaning up his messes and sipping champagne while the place goes to the dogs.
The daughters of the house are obviously under some sort of curse, possibly the result of inbreeding. Sybil runs off with a man considered unsuitable by her father, which proves he is an excellent choice. But she gets her comeuppance by dying in childbirth when the Earl trusts a titled medical quack in preference to a commoner with an up to date education.
The other daughters are more robust in health and manage to survive, but the men foolish enough to touch them are inevitably doomed. Edith’s first love interest is wounded in the Great War and jilts her, apparently deciding he has suffered enough. Her second, the father of her illegitimate child, is killed by Nazis in Germany where he has gone to obtain a divorce from his mad first wife. This is straight out of “The World Turns,” though entirely to be expected in a show that has also offered such cheesy romance staples as amnesia and temporary paralysis.
Lady Mary, of course, is the Typhoid Mary of the piece. During a fling with an exotic foreigner imported from “The Sheik,” he drops dead in her bed. Her husband-to-be, Matthew, survives the War, but not the advent of the automobile. And another suitor is willing to tempt fate, but Lady Mary wisely decides the pile of corpses outside her bedroom door is getting rather high. She remains unattached as the final season commences, but sentimental viewers are clearly rooting for her to enter the lists once again.
She’d better hurry. With the Great Depression and World War II just over the horizon, it is unlikely Downton will survive much longer, especially under current management. So it is just as well the series is taking its last lap. Its romantic audience would find it too painful to see the place turned over to the National Trust to dodge death duties, or tuned into a moldering B&B, or rented out as a setting for BBC melodramas. It would also be jarring to have to watch the Earl and his heirs forced to seek gainful employment, especially since they would probably find themselves working for people exactly like Thomas Barrow. Sic Transit Gloria Downton.