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.