I fear that with the
new Titanic/amnesia story line, and the who-killed-Bates’-wife story line, Downton Abbey may just be jumping the shark. How much drama can happen in one family? It’s been lots of fun, for sure. The PBS soap about the masters and servants of an Edwardian
mansion is gorgeous to look at (oh, the dresses!), and the characters are pretty interesting, although they are starting to get a little garbled. (Who is Edith, anyway? The bitchy, put-upon middle child? The rough-and-tumble adulterous auto mechanic? The soldiers' angel of mercy?)
Oh well. Downton Abbey is nevertheless a sensation and Sunday night appointment
TV for thousands of people. Just as, in 1970s, my mother and I sat down together Sunday nights to watch Upstairs,
Downstairs¸ a PBS series with the same premise, except in a London
townhouse. Upstairs, Downstairs ran
for five seasons and the characters became familiar as family. So I was
thrilled to see it available for streaming on Netfix, and I’ve been gobbling it
up, two and three episodes at a time.
Well, now. Even though the first several episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs are in black and white, and the production
values are primitive compared to Downtown
Abbey, Upstairs, Downstairs is a
hundred times more colorful, even without amnesia and murder. (Though I do recall a Titanic story somewhere along the way.) It is radical, dealing with brutal
class issues in a way Downton Abbey only
tiptoes around, and its story lines, dealt with sensitively but boldly, include
adultery, rape, homosexuality (men and women), suicide and its aftermath. And that’s
just season one.
Upstairs, Downstairs reminds me, yet
again, how bold art was in the 1970s, how tepid and cautious it has become
today.
Oh of course,
there’s lots of sex and violence in today’s movies and television, lots of
bombastic boundaries-pushing. But the raw emotion and honesty of 1970s movies
like Midnight Cowboy, Network and Badlands have given way to comic book sex and
violence, and glossy re-imagining of the past. Villains in today’s blockbusters
are as believable as the moustache twirlers of the silent era, or if they
represent our past, they are gentled up, to humanize them and not hurt anyone’s
feelings.
Today, we deal
with race with The Help, about a
white girl making life better for the African-American maids of her hometown
during Jim Crow. She pushes up against mostly benign racists (they are such meanies!), and though brutal
consequences are hinted at in the story, the protagonists get away with an
awful lot without anything really bad happening. Certainly not as bad as the
stuff that really happened at that time.
Even the sitcoms
of the ‘70s dealt with issues in a full-frontal fashion, rather than the
tittering, judgmental, or maudlin ways we see now. Among other things, All In The Family dealt honestly and
confrontationally with race. One episode of Maude
deals (in a shockingly casual fashion, by today’s standard) with prescription
pill dependency. In another, Maude becomes pregnant and has an abortion--an
untouchable topic these days, though it remains a reality of life. Abortions don’t
happen in TVland anymore, and not so much in movies, either--at least not
without moral retribution. And that is neither to condemn nor condone
abortions, but only to say that it is a reality that even artists have learned
to shy away from for fear of offending.
I have good-old-days
syndrome, to be sure. I am homesick for my hometown of New
York City New York City
There was honesty
to yesterday’s grittiness and unflinching confrontation with what is versus what we can invent, and what
really was rather than what we wish it had been. Downton Abbey is lovely, and we root for Lady Sybil and her
chauffer suitor to transcend class and find love. But Upstairs, Downstairs more shockingly presents a maid who is raped
by the young master of the house in which she previously worked, and then
dismissed from her new job at the Bellamy’s household because she is pregnant
and helpless against the class mores of the times. It’s appalling, and
probably closer to reality than Maggie Smith’s haughty but harmless sniffs of
distain in Downton Abbey.
Downton Abbey puts a thick layer of
sugar coating on the life of the serving class, which doesn’t do justice to the
true story of the times. But it seems that we are not courageous enough to face
who we really were--and are.
