Via: Tuned In
The first episode of Downton Abbey‘s season 3 is riddled with Americans. There is, of course, Cora, representing for us Yanks as usual from within the Crawley family. But there’s also Cora’s mother, Martha (Shirley MacLaine), who turns up as a foil for the Dowager Countess, with a bracing wit to prick all that richly upholstered English stuffing. We even have a saucy American flapper, who has the brass to walk right up to men and kiss them—just like that!—because “I’m an American, and this is 1920.” As that line may have clued you in, all this Americanism on Downton represents the unsettling forces of egalitarianism and change. (Because pretty much everything on Downton does. Drinking game: when anyone says, “The world has changed,” down a glass of claret.) When plans for a formal dinner are ruined, it’s the flexible, resourceful Martha who organizes an “indoor picnic,” to the horror of butler Mr. Carson. (“It’s really not how we do it.” “How you used to do it.” The world has changed.) And when Lord Grantham guiltily admits losing her money, Cora stoically answers, “I’m an American. Have gun, will travel.” (There’s also a supporting role for Canada, a bad investment in which precipitates the financial crisis that may cost the Crawleys their fortune and, worse, their fabulous house.) Maybe it took the arrival of so many of my countrymen to make me aware of it, but season 3 of Downton Abbey has convinced me why I’m not as gaga over the upstairs-downstairs soap as some of my fellow TV-lovers. I am missing the Anglophilia gene. This limitation of mine does not apply to Downton alone. I have never been stirred by a bowler hat, Union Jack or finely arrayed tea service. As a reader, I was always partial to outsider Irishmen like James Joyce over English drawing-room fiction. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I’m always anxious for the characters to get the hell out of the bucolic English microcosm of The Shire. I liked American punk over British
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: January 4th, 2013
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