Irin Carmon explores the popularity of the PBS period drama "Downton Abbey":
"I actually think it’s a lot like 'The West Wing,'" Steve Jacobs, a political communications strategist and a fan of the show, told me. "Lord Grantham is the platonic ideal of an English aristocrat, just like Jed Bartlet was the platonic ideal of an American president. The very fact that Grantham and Bartlet are so good and selfless is, to me, an indication that they’re not meant to be completely accurate depictions of their real-life counterparts." Even if a democratically -elected president differs in earned legitimacy from an earl, both involve a Great Man shaping history.
As Max Read, a writer at Gawker, says of the analogy, “Both shows suffer from operating under ideas of politics/history that focus on the individual actor rather than the system. So the nobility and selflessness of Bartlet and the earl justify the systems in which they work … It’s a very classically conservative notion of history.”
Simon Schama wonders why Americans like the show so much. Kathryn Hughes offers a British perspective:
In the 1970s, the original Upstairs, Downstairs soothed anxieties about the power of the trades union and the disruptive capacity of "women’s lib" by showing a deferential working class and a set of women, both above and below stairs, who lived within the status quo. In 2011, our anxieties are more concerned with ethics than political justice, in particular with what might be described as social connection. …
For as we ourselves travel further into a period of economic decline that has already involved the partial dismantling of such engines of social equality as the National Health Service, old-age pensions, and free higher education, we realize that it is not out of the realm of possibility that harder and faster divisions could open up once more. The thought of being dependent on someone else’s goodwill, kind heart, and strict conscience does not seem quite so benign after all.
Alyssa Rosenberg sees the onset of WWI in the second season as a reminder that war can be a great equalizer. The first season is available to stream on Netflix and may consume most of your weekend.
The Dish 