“Downton Abbey” opens in April 1912 with news of the Titanic sinking, and that is no accident. The Crawley family learns the heir to their estate went down with the ship, and the show’s whole engine starts turning. Julian Fellowes created the series for ITV1, and it ran for six seasons, from 26 September 2010 to 8 November 2015. It is a drama about an aristocratic household and the servants below stairs, set on a fictional Yorkshire estate between 16 April 1912 and New Year’s Eve 1925.
Trailer, via Kinolog.
The Crawleys and the Servants Below
Hugh Bonneville plays Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham. Elizabeth McGovern is his wife Cora, the Countess of Grantham. Their three daughters are Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay). Maggie Smith is Robert’s mother, Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and she is the reason a lot of people watched.
The household staff carry as much of the show as the family does. Jim Carter is Mr Carson, the butler. Phyllis Logan is Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper. Joanne Froggatt is Anna Smith, Brendan Coyle is John Bates. The show treats their lives as equal in weight to the family’s, which is the thing that separates it from a costume display.
The casting widened as the seasons went on. Dan Stevens plays Matthew Crawley, the new heir, with Penelope Wilton as his mother Isobel. Allen Leech is Tom Branson, who starts as the chauffeur, marries Sybil and later becomes the estate’s agent. Shirley MacLaine appears in series three and four as Cora’s mother, Martha Levinson. Matthew Goode plays Henry Talbot, one of Mary’s suitors.
History Keeps Interrupting
The show uses real events as plot pressure. The first series leans on the Titanic. The second brings the First World War, the Spanish influenza pandemic and the Marconi scandal. The third covers the Irish War of Independence and the formation of the Irish Free State. The fourth folds in the Teapot Dome scandal. The fifth runs through the British general election of 1923 and the Beer Hall Putsch.
The final series is the one with a real argument underneath it. It introduces the rise of the working class during the interwar period and hints at the eventual decline of the British aristocracy. That is a bigger subject than the show usually takes on, and it gives the ending more weight than a wedding or a funeral would.
Here is how the show’s two halves sit against each other:
| Element | The Crawley family | The household staff |
|---|---|---|
| Key figures | Robert, Cora, Mary, Edith, Sybil, Violet | Carson, Mrs Hughes, Anna, Bates |
| Setting | The estate above stairs | The estate below stairs |
| Arc across six series | Marriage plots, inheritance, decline | Service, loyalty, slow social change |
What Holds Up, and What Doesn’t
The show’s best trick is that it never picks a side. Robert’s household and Carson’s household are both shown as people doing a job, and the friction between them is the drama rather than the point. Maggie Smith’s Violet gets the sharpest lines, but the show does not lean on her alone.
The weaker stretch is the middle. Series four and five are the point where the historical events start to feel like decoration rather than pressure. The Teapot Dome scandal has almost nothing to do with a Yorkshire estate, and the show does not work hard to connect it. The plot machinery gets more visible in those years than it did in the first three.
What survives is the scale of the thing. Six seasons is a long commitment, and the show earns most of it. The sixth series is the strongest late run, because it finally says out loud what the earlier seasons only implied: this world is ending.
- Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film
- Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries or Movie
- Praised by television critics across its run
- Recognised as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Classic anthology in the US
What the Six Seasons Add Up To
“Downton Abbey” is not a subtle show, and it does not need to be. It is a well-built drama about a household under pressure from history it cannot control, and it runs that idea for six seasons without losing the thread. The middle stretch drags, and some of the historical scaffolding is thinner than the show thinks it is.
The audience score of 8.1/10, drawn from 1,250 votes, is about right. This is a show that does what it sets out to do, and does it with a cast that mostly holds the line. It is worth the time.
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