Reply to Downtown Abbey season 4 premiere -- possible spoilers!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I stopped watching about 15 minutes in.  I think the show should have stopped running a season or two ago.

First of all, I just couldn't get into, "OMG, Lady Grantham will have no one to dress her, the horror!!!"  But whatever, perhaps that was a crisis in 1920's upper class England.

But beyond that, there simply would not have been the interaction or personal relationships between the help and the nobility in that time period in England.

And for PPs who will say "but those people worked in their homes for X years, of course, they got to know them," you don't know anything about British upper class culture then or now.

So, as a period piece, it fails on so many levels.

There's very little character development.  I mean, most of the characters are pretty much the same with the same problems as they were first season.  Even the estate has the same problem:  Who will run it?  It's like there's no real story arc, just kind of an eternal return to the same themes.

I don't know if I'll continue with it.  I think it should have been just a 1 or 2 season show.

Flame away![/quote]

No flaming.  I still find the show entertaining but agree with you on many points.  In a way, DA is a victim of it's own success.  I think part of the issue is that Julian Fellowes' strength is really more of a screen/miniseries writer- as someone else mentioned, it was never really thought that DA would go beyond a season.  And then poof, everyone loved it, and it was renewed.  He tends to write himself in a box and rely on "letters from the grave" to resolve the problem too much.

I watched seasons 1-3 on Netflix over a course of a month last spring and watching them in such quick succession was interesting- season 1 was like candy, when one finished I wanted to go straight to the next.  I know some people thought season 2 was too melodramatic and all over the place but I devoured that too.  Season 3 took me longer to get through- partly because I knew the deaths were coming but some of the subplots just got so tiresome (Bates in jail, that ex-maid turned prostitute who's name I can't remember now, etc.). It was disappointing after the first 2 seasons were so good.

That said, I still like it enough to continue watching it.  I enjoyed the premiere enough, even with the -again- silly subplots. [/quote]

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