this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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I got sort of an inverse impression of Downton Abbey. For me, it was about inevitable change, since practically every single truth held by the most conservative characters is at some point bent or entirely overturned, often by themselves. Literally all of the gentry are huge hypocrites.
It also spends a good amount of time creating parallels in the lives of the different classes that, for me, underscored how there was nothing fundamentally special about the aristocracy besides their wealth. Wealth that they never earned and only held onto because a peasant Irish driver who banged their daughter forcibly removed their heads from their assess.
It just doesn't seek to accomplish all this by making the upper class into Disney villains, since that's rarely how people actually are. But I never got the impression the show was trying to say this is how things should have or had to have been.
This is a great counterpoint, thanks for taking the time to write this thoughtful response. Imo, Downton paints a rosy picture of the gentry, one of kind, intelligent people who are willing to change with the times if only they understood the need; one where there's a healthy mutualism between the gentry and those under them (house servants, tenants, etc). Maybe that really is how it was, idk, I'm American and all of our gentry equivalent seem to feel little responsibility to those upon whom they depend.
That's fair. The rosiness I always attributed to the fact it's basically a fancy soap opera with a huge budget.
The Crowleys are definitely depicted as kind lords, though the show contrasts them several times with other less humane counterparts. I don't have the education to rate its historical accuracy, however.