Abbey Code

I just finished watching the first season of the popular and critical succcess Downton Abbey.  The British miniseries is set at an entailed English country estate where there's much ado about who will run things when the present-day Earl is gone. The story starts in 1912 when the Titanic sinks (killing some potential heirs) and ends with WWI about to start. I understand the second series covers the war, and a third series will soon be filmed.

It's one of those upstairs/downstairs stories, with the action split between the aristocrats' troubles and the servants' troubles.  Not surprising considering it was created by Julian Fellowes, who wrote Gosford Park.  There are about 20 regular characters, all with their own little dramas: Lady Mary, the Earl's oldest daughter who, being a female, cannot inherit the estate; Bates, the valet with the mysterious past; Gwen, the housemaid who'd like to leave service and do something newfangled like becoming a typist; and so on. (Watching it soon after Game Of Thrones, where people heads are lopped of with regularity, the stakes sometimes felt pretty low.)

It's soap opera, I suppose, but high-class soap opera done well enough that you don't need to be embarrassed.  It's intriguing how the PBS and the art house crowd find stories set in great British houses so fascinating. Maybe part of it is that it's such an obvious cross-section of society that it's a convenient method of telling stories.  But perhaps more important in our egalitarian society is we're intrigued (or even long for) the type of order that barely exists any more--a world where everyone knew their place.  Where servants were proud of their station, and knew how to defer to their betters, and where the upper class, freed from regular work (even looking down on it), had a sense of responsibility and dignity.  This is, of course, an idealized version of the world that probably never quite existed.  But the sense of order is attractive to a lot of people.  Though I have to wonder if they identify with the indolent peerage or the hardworking servants.