Why is Downton Abbey so popular?

Why are so many U.S. viewers so enamored with Downton Abbey, which ended its third season on PBS last Sunday?

This British period drama television series, created by Julian Fellowes, is set in a fictional Yorkshire country estate of Downton Abbey and depicts the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era.

Like the popular series Upstairs Downstairs, which aired on PBS over five seasons, 1971-75, Downton dramatizes the lives of the aristocratic family and of their servants, as well as their interactions.

Class is entrenched in British life, set according to what family one is born into, while Americans like to deny its reality, believing anyone can climb the ladder of success. Downton accentuates this difference at times with the presence of Cora, Countess of Grantham, an American heiress married to Robert, Earl of Grantham, whose estate is facing financial problems in season three.

Perhaps part of the appeal of Downton is this strange interplay of characters from the upper and lower classes.

But no, that’s true of just about every British product on TV. And besides, the show is equally popular in Great Britain. In fact, it has become one of the most widely watched television shows in the world.

Critics, while lauding the show’s acting, have not been unanimous in their accolades. In “Brideshead Regurgitated” (The Atlantic, January/February), James Parker calls Downton a “ludicrously popular aristosoap” and says its motto might be: “Footmen have feelings, too.”

Parker goes on to call Downton “a harmless, anachronistic masque of manners, in which the players keep obediently to their roles and thereby gratify the innate conservatism of the audience.”

Others include Simon Schama, the British historian, who complained in Time that Downton misrepresented how awful World War I was, along with other historical inaccuracies.

But Downton is not a documentary; it is, as Parker says, a soap opera. Fellowes has created characters that, on the one hand, tend to be all good, like Anna (a housemaid) or Bates (a valet) or Mrs. Hughes (a housekeeper), or pretty bad, like Thomas (a footman) or O’Brien (a lady’s maid). On the other hand, he introduces some changes in certain characters as they face adversity and respond in either heroic or tragic ways.

The fact is, audiences love characters they can boo and those they can cheer. And while we’re being manipulated by melodrama, we often don’t care.

Mondays have found Facebook posts commenting on the previous night’s episode. The setting and the travails of these fictional characters from another era that is also quite fictional, despite its occasional historical signposts, take us away from our mundane or less interesting lives for a moment each week.

That’s what entertainment does, whether it’s a PBS soap or a football game or a concert or a murder mystery. Humans throughout history have sought diversions from their day-to-day lives.

Are such diversions bad? Not as long as we don’t accept them as some kind of Truth (with a capital T).

Downton may not present an accurate sense of what life was really like on estates in post-Edwardian England or present realistic characters. But it’s fun to watch, an enjoyable diversion before heading back to work. 

Life's too-quick passing

Turkish novelist and screenwriter Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006. His works have sold more than 11 million copies in 60 languages. Many of his novels, including Snow and My Name Is Red, as well as some of his nonfiction works, have been translated into English. But Silent House (Knopf, 2012, $26.95, 334 pages), his second novel, first published in 1983, is just now out in English.

 

Pamuk’s narratives are complex and often deal with the conflict between Eastern and Western values. Most are set in Turkey, whether contemporary or historical, and reflect issues and conflicts within that nation.

Silent House, though not as complex as later works, is set during a tense time in Turkey before the military coup of 1980. The point of view of its 32 titled chapters alternate among an array of characters who come together in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul.

Fatma is a mostly bedridden widow who resides in an old mansion she owns. She has lived there for decades and recalls her husband, an idealistic doctor who died years earlier. Waiting on her is her servant, Recep, a dwarf and the doctor’s illegitimate son. They depend on each other but are not friendly to one another.

Fatma’s three grandchildren—her son also died years before—make their annual summer visit and at one point go with her to visit her husband and son’s graves. They do not share her Islamic faith but go more out of duty.

Faruk, the eldest, is a budding alcoholic and obsessed with history. He visits the local archive and tries to write a coherent history. His sister, Nilgün, is a leftist who likes to go to the beach each morning in this resort town. Metin, the youngest, is in high school and hangs out with his wealthier schoolmates while fantasizing about going to America, if he can only talk his grandmother into selling the house, moving into an apartment and giving her grandchildren the profit.

The other character we hear from is Hasan, Recep’s nephew, a high school dropout who has fallen in with right-wing nationalists and carries an unrequited love for Nilgün.

Fatma, the grandmother, spends sleepless hours in the “silent house,” which is falling apart, ruminating about her atheist husband, who sold her jewelry, piece by piece, in order to pay for his project of writing an encyclopedia. She inhales “the smell of old age that rises up, and in the alligator darkness [her] little dry hand fishes for [her] handkerchief and [she dabs her] poor dry eyes.” She tells herself, “I’ve spent my whole life in pain” and looks forward to death.

The younger folk all long for a different life, for something to change. Faruk drinks and thinks of his wife, who left him, and calls out “desperately for someone or something, as if trapped in a nightmare that [he] can’t wake up from and escape.” Later, he thinks: “I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind.”

Hasan, the son of the doctor’s other bastard son, feels the separation from his cousins, is in love with Nilgün and wants to impress his fellow nationalists. He says in his mind: “I don’t know yet what it is that I’m going to do, but you’re all going to be amazed.” Yet he, too, ends up alone.

Recep, who seems the most content of them all, nevertheless must endure taunts from others about his size. He reflects: “I sometimes think it would be nice to have a friend I could be silent with.”

Pamuk deftly combines these characters’  internal struggles with the political turmoil going on around them. One character, referring to politics, says, “No matter where you go, it grabs you by the collar.”

Following a tragedy, Fatma recalls her childhood, when she found solace in a book, because “no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you’ve finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn’t understand before.”

Silent House is not Pamuk’s best work, and without a better understanding of Turkey’s turmoil in 1980, it may be difficult to understand. Nevertheless, his characters’ struggles grab you by the collar and make you care about them and about life’s too-quick passing.

How much military spending is enough?

As discussions continue about the federal budget and how to reduce spending, we hear little about the so-called defense budget. And if we do, some congressional leader often bemoans even considering cuts in the military.

In “The Force” (The New Yorker, Jan. 28), Jill Lepore asks, How much military is enough? She reports on the House Armed Services Committee, whose chair, Howard P. McKeon (R-Calif.), though he has never served in the military, “believes that it’s his job to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts.”

Lepore points out that “the United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined” and that “between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than $700 billion a year.”

She then reviews the history of U.S. military spending. “Early Americans,” she writes, “considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny.” And in fact, the United States did not establish a standing army until World War II. And the Armed Services Committee was formed in 1946.

With the onset of the Cold War, military spending ballooned, and in the 1950s it “made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget.” Much of that increase was also pushed by military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, who “argued not only for military expansion but also for federal subsidies.”

At a hearing on the future of the military on Sept. 8, 2011, John Garamendi (D-Calif.) read aloud from a speech by President Eisenhower from 1953 in which he said, “This world in arms … is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. … This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.”

Eisenhower, Lepore notes, was “the son of pacifist Mennonites who considered war a sin.” In his farewell address in 1961, he said “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

“If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called ‘unwarranted influence,’ it is Lockheed Martin,” writes Lepore. Its contracts with the Pentagon amount to about “$30 billion each year, and it “spends $15 million a year on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.”

Lepore quotes from soldier-critics who oppose the endless warmaking and excessive military spending that has occured in the past decade. The most persuasive of these, she writes, is Andrew J. Bacevich, a career Army officer and now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Bacevich argues that Americans “have fallen prey to militarism,” which “defines the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”

He blames much of this on intellectuals, both conservative and liberal. “The resort to force,” Lepore writes, “is a product of political failure” and a failure of political culture.

She notes that Bacevich has lost patience with “CNN loudmouths, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell, Wesley Clark, Tom Clancy, Bill Clinton.” Bacevich, she writes, “deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.”

As Bacevich notes, militarism is like an illness that romanticizes what is barbarous. Our government needs a dose of sanity as it considers the exorbitant amount being spent to feed this illness.