And its fourth season was widely decried as its worst. That's not to say that every episode is must-see television: like many small-screen juggernauts that take off from the pilot, *Downton *struggled to captivate its audience as strongly in its sophomore season. _Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip: _Truth be told, even Downton Abbey’s weakest episodes offer an hour of 20th-century escapism and lush imagery.
The Dowager Countess of Grantham, Maggie Smith’s surprisingly hip matriarch, who steals every scene in which she appears with her deliciously biting one-liners. But Downton Abbey’s undoubted star is Violet Crawley, a.k.a. Hughes offer up some of the show’s sweetest moments scheming Thomas Barrow enjoys one of the show's most wide-ranging character arcs, and while there have been points where it seems like the show’s creators can’t decide whether to make him a villain or not, his personal struggles offer an interesting-albeit surface-level-glimpse of homosexuality in old-school English society and that minxy Lady Mary Crawley is often up to something interesting (even if none of her many, many suitors have managed to match the chemistry she had with Matthew Crawley in the show’s earliest days). The servants-quarter love stories of John and Anna Bates or Mr.
_Best Character to Follow: _As a genuine ensemble drama, there are dozens of characters to follow-both upstairs and downstairs. And it’s that mix of real-world events and the show’s frothier elements (sex and blackmail and fortune-hunters, oh my!) that make it such a compelling watch. That irruption of real history into fiction is a hallmark of the series, and a clever device for advancing its narrative World War I, the Marconi and Teapot Dome scandals, and the Beer Hall Putsch are just a few of the world events that eventually work their way into the series.
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The series kicks off in 1912 in the hours following the sinking of the Titanic, an event that has a personal effect on the Crawley household: the estate’s heir, Patrick Crawley, was one of the ship’s fatalities (more on that later). But it does establish that Fellowes has got a cheeky side. No, it’s not meant to be crass-there’s very little of that in the show. Watch the first few seconds of the show’s opening credits, in which John Lunn’s gorgeous theme music is accompanied by the image of a dog’s ass (or hindquarters, if we’re being proper), and you’ll see it. Like *Upstairs Downstairs *before it, *Downton Abbey *features a hearty helping of snobbishness, both within the family and from a few of the more entitled staff members, but it does so with a wink. Lord Fellowes of West Stafford, the series follows the ups, downs, and waydowns of the aristocratic Crawley family-inhabitants of the titular estate-and their (mostly) loyal team of servants. Somewhere between a nighttime soap opera and prestige historical drama lives Downton Abbey, the hit British series that has been setting viewership records for PBS since making its "Masterpiece" debut in 2010.
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