There are two distinct worlds at play in Julian Fellowes’s epic drama about aristocratic life in the early twentieth century. There is a fine line where the upstairs meets the downstairs – that’s where Downton Abbey (Star World Premier), now in its sixth and final season, is set.
The family of Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, lives in the fictional Downton Abbey in Yorkshire. It consists of his lovely American wife Cora and their three daughters Mary, Edith and Sybil. Robert and Cora have no son, and Lady Mary was set to marry her cousin, the heir to Downton Abbey, before he went down with the Titanic on April12, 1912. This is the day our story begins.
Matthew Crawley is a distant cousin who comes to Downton as the next heir, awkwardly trying to fit into the life and traditions of the rich and famous of the early 1900s. His arrival sets into motion a most remarkable love story. However, Downton Abbey is anything but just a love story.
It is, effectively, a novel (and if the talks work out, a movie too) in six parts about the family upstairs and their servants downstairs, who work tirelessly and invisibly to maintain a house as huge, and a life as grand, as of the Crawleys, no matter how the world is changing around them.
We see a great war, a revolution, the Spanish influenza, the first ever telephone, hunting trips and debutante balls – and it is all magnificent.
Foregrounding the highly engaging and often scandalous lives of the Crawley sisters, the show is a commentary on class differences, gender politics, race, tradition and the gradual, often reluctant, breaking away from it. It makes you nostalgic for a time you have not lived through but whose charm, poise and grandiosity is inviting to the most distracted of souls. But then you go downstairs and the way you look at the 1920s changes, not necessarily for the better.
A special mention must go out to the Dowager Countess of Gratham, Lady Violet Crawley, played by the universally unmatched Dame Maggie Smith, who is the heart of the show. She delivers burn after burn, and no one, not even the earl himself, is safe from her scathing wit. #Dowagerism for the win!
