Monday, January 20, 2014

Some thoughts about Downton Abbey

Yes.  I know.  My aversion to this series is practically pathological.  It has a lot to do with my nature, which is essentially contrary.

Still.

Ken Cannon tried to watch a little of it last night.  He sort of casually turned it on and pretended he didn't notice what was on and that if somehow he did that,  I wouldn't notice either.  So just to humor him I tried to watch DA for a minute--but then Anna started crying, crying, crying, and I left the room because I AM SO SICK OF THESE PEOPLE being stupid.  Season after season.  The props change, but the characters don't.  They just keep on being stupid.

And suddenly it occurred to me that this is why I get impatient with soap operas.  Nobody really grows or changes, unlike what happens in a novel.

Or at least the kinds of novels I like.


9 comments:

Megan Goates said...

It's true. Downton is Days of Our Lives in a 1920's English country house. Also true: novels are better.

CSIowa said...

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I guess the advantage of being forced to kill Matthew off is that Mary can now shed all semblance of growth, revert to her former self and make the same mistakes all over again.

Lord Grantham's stagnation is the stagnation that I find most irritating of all.

radagast said...

I, too, was an early hater. I'm a total Anglophile, but I just felt manipulated by the BBC. These Americans will swoon over any dreck we send them, as long as we dress it up.

Lisa B. said...

Listen, I am taping DA, but I find I just don't really give a damn. I was SO FREAKING ANNOYED with how they killed off dear cousin Matthew Crawley last year that I thought, you know what? who cares. And that's how it remains. No. Also, Maureen O'Dowd had a great column where she talked about how all that manor house rot was pretty much BS, as far as she and her forebears-once-in-service were concerned. That kind of sealed the deal for me.

James said...

I remember a joke from my childhood that went something like a soap opera is the only place it takes 11 months to have a premature baby. Maybe DA is the second place something like that could happen.

Donna Tagliaferri said...

I watched soap operas with my mother, I watched them all through college continued on with marriage and small children...one day I did the most amazing thing, I stopped watching. Completely. Every once in a while a teaser for young and the restless will come up on regular tv, and I am completely caught up!! You are right, they never change, they never grow up and they hardly age.

Bonnie White said...

I'm not as big a hater as many of you are here. Still, if it were just up to Mary and Lady Grantham, I would have checked out Episode 1, Season 1. They both drive me crazy with LG's fake and wooden accent and Mary's pathetic attempts at being independent. The rape of Anna, the death of Matthew, Mary's Turkish lover are all too much. So why do I continue to watch: Maggie Smith, the costumes, the nastiness of Thomas and hoping that Edith will come out of that mess on top.

Bob the Woodworker said...

I'm a little angry with all this password stuff.

Bob the Woodworker said...

Just to set the record straight, twice, Ken Cannon is not really a closet Downton Abbey lover. He finds most of the characters annoying and not very interesting. That house, though, that's worth seeing once in a while, though any house that requires like a hundred servants is pretty silly. The second record-straightening setting is that Bob the Woodcutter did not submit the comment about password stuff, though he may have been complaining enough to have caused the comment.