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Stiff upper lips for ‘Downton Abbey’s’ disappointing return

By Hank Stuever,January 05, 2012

View Photo Gallery - ‘Downton Abbey’ fashion, from costume to the runway: ’Downton…

World War I rages and things are getting grim at that fictional, many-roomed North Yorkshire countryside castle known to us all as Downton Abbey: Dashing distant cousin Matthew, the heir apparent, is doing battle in the trenches of the Somme. At home, the Earl of Grantham, his wife, daughters and their loyal staff bravely agree to let the castle become a rehab hospital for wounded British officers.

For all the stiff upper lips, bad news nevertheless abounds. People are always walking into rooms (those jaw-droppingly fabulous rooms) bearing just-opened letters and telegrams: I have terrible news, they say. Or: Bad news, I’m afraid.

Sorry to say that I must also chime in with a spot of bother: After such breathless anticipation, the second season of “Downton Abbey,” which begins Sunday night on PBS stations, fails in a few important ways to match its original charm. It instead becomes a cautionary example of what happens when we get precisely what we ask for.

The first season, which aired a year ago to runaway praise and viewership, was a wonderfully kinetic juggling act of highbrow drama, historical sweep and character development. It was great fun to watch, not only for anglophiles (an easy get) but also, more surprisingly, for anglophobes. “Downton Abbey” struck an odd chord in an era of 21st-century economic dissonance and disgust. It was and still is the very definition of escapism, dialing back 100 years to celebrate the wealth gap rather than disparage it. It persists in the fantasy that a quaint and even tender co-dependence exists between the haves and the have-nots in their employ. To our lasting humiliation, we gobble it up.

The first season was also only six hours long, which at the time seemed too brief. Viewers got a taste of “Downton Abbey’s” soothing opiate of corseted class stricture and meticulous manners and instantly craved more. Count your TV critic among its swoony fans; just last month I put the series at the top of my list of 2011’s best TV shows.

So what goes awry this time? It’s quite possible that we just wanted it all too badly, a desire most sequels struggle to fulfill. “Downton Abbey” went back into production on a wave of demands: Make it richer, make it longer and give us more, more, more; now, now, now. Writer and creator Julian Fellowes hastily came back with a lot more.

But that’s about all he’s come back with. At 10 sumptuous hours in total length, “Downton Abbey” lacks surprise and is stretched precariously thin, a house full of fascinating people with not nearly enough to do, all caught in a loop of weak storylines that circle round but never fully propel. Built on a recurring theme (and historical generality) that the war will change British life and dismantle its musty social barriers and norms, “Downton Abbey” seems unwilling to fully engage that transformation.

Missing momentum

In the first eight hours (parts 1-6; PBS provided all but the final two-hour episode in time for this review), the characters endure the war with a lot of minor drama but little in the way of profound loss or personal change, even though the script keeps promising full-on disaster. The foreshadowing is often quite thick, but the follow-through is often next to nil.

Midway along, you’ll get the sneaking suspicion that Fellowes adores his characters far too much to let anything of real consequence happen to them. Affairs are pondered but unpursued. A disfigured stranger arrives in comically stagey facial bandages, claiming to be someone the family believes dead, and then disappears as quickly as he came. A member of the staff schemes to commit a crime of protest during the visit of a dignitary, but what happens instead is anticlimactic, to say the least.

Momentum — the first season’s strongest quality — now eludes “Downton Abbey.” As before, no scene ever lasts longer than a few minutes at most, which allows the show to track 20 different characters trying to solve at least 20 different crises. This time, that can often feel like prolonged chaos, and it leaves little room for character development. Everyone just keeps updating one another on the same gossip.

The writing is flat from the first. One by one, the characters return in the opening episode in a way that feels as if they’ll be greeted upon entry by Lenny-and-Squiggy-style applause. Plots unfold clumsily, and relationships are teased out past the point of believability. A few hours in, you’ll become able to say a character’s lines seconds before he or she says them. You’ll no sooner think of a question or historical point (what about the Spanish flu of 1918?) than it is suddenly addressed. And a couple of deathbed scenes would give soap-opera writers a fit of the giggles. It’s as if the United Kingdom has finally returned a gift America gave it years ago: “Knots Landing.”

Speechless beauty