“Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.” Given how poorly the previous season was paced – so badly that “poorly paced” serves quite well as a primary descriptor for the season – it’s a bit astonishing that so much happened in these two...

For the second week in a row a super-serious plot development was greeted with gales of laughter by us. “Leaped up to save her from the threat of footstools! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!” “Everyone starts dropping like flies and then gets better! Except –Oh,...

We suppose it would be a bit obnoxious to start this review off with a long, healthy round of belly laughter, wouldn’t it? Because there was quite a bit of sustained belly laughter last night when they tried to foist a blow-to-the-head-causing-amnesia plot on us. The singing was bad...

The war came to Downton. Oh, sure; the war came to Downton back when Lord Grantham first announced the beginning of it at their garden party. The war came to Downton when the Crawley daughters all felt the call of responsibility and left behind (mostly) the trappings of the idle rich. The war...

This was the hour of Series 2 where everything seemed to come together. Not that the first 2 hours were a mess or anything, but there was an awful lot of catching up and setting up to do before we could get to the meat of the story. With this hour, we felt like we could see the shape of the...

War has driven right up to the front door of Downton Abbey, drastically upsetting the status quo and working its way into every corner of the house, much like the smell of Lady Mary’s burning hair caused by her new-fangled curling iron.  From where to store the sheets to centuries-old class...

Say what you will about Downton Abbey creator and lead writer Julian Fellowes, he doesn’t waste time. Not only did this first episode plunge us right in the war by sending us straight to the front lines, it checked in on every single character and introduced storylines for all of them,...

With this final installment of the first series of Downton Abbey, it seems to us that the writers did everything they could to wrap up every storyline of the series while leaving just enough dangling plot threads to entice the viewer to come back for more. Of course, ending just as World War I...

This episode was the first time we had real issues with the plotting on the show. Up to this point it’s been fairly well done, but when you have two characters causing drama for no better reason than because drama is needed, the stories start to falter for us a bit. In both instances...

If last episode was the one where the show indulged its soap opera tendencies by introducing a bunch of running plotlines, this is the one that turned in a slightly different direction by setting all those plotlines in motion, away from each other. In other words, the world of Downton keeps...

Somewhere along the way, when we announced we’d be blogging Downton Abbey from the beginning, some people expressed their extreme disappointment with the soon-to-be-aired-in-the-U.S. second season, dismissing it as having become a soap opera. This left us scratching our heads....

As the title of this post indicates, this episode presented a defining moment for the character of Lady Mary, one that was pretty shocking to the viewer the first time they saw it. We knew Mary was intelligent and bold; we knew that she chafed under the rigid social mores of the time, but we...

We should note before we continue that, for a bunch of reasons, we chose the Netflix version of the series to blog. Basically it came down to which platform would be the best way for people who haven’t seen the show to follow along with our writeups. We didn’t realize that PBS...

A drama about the upstairs lives and downstairs lives in a (just post-) Edwardian English country house isn’t exactly a new idea. If you have even the barest interest in the topic, you could probably rattle off a half-dozen films and TV series right off the top of your head that explored...

Much to discuss regarding the world of the Crawleys and Granthams, darlings. First, here are some video highlights of that fabulous Downton Abbey screening event that we got to attend last week: We wish the entire Q&A was online to be viewed because it was a fun, raucous affair. But we...

We had the distinct pleasure of attending a screening hosted by WNET, the New York PBS station, of Downton Abbey’s premiere episode of season 2. The first 50 minutes of it, anyway. Even better, we had the pure thrill of several cast members coming out for a 45-minute Q&A...