This post contains spoilers through the February 12 episode of Downton Abbey.

As part of the ongoing debate over Downton obsession, Reihan Salam’s theorized that we like the show because it gives us elites who have higher aspirations than the ones we’ve got today. After this episode, I’d amend that somewhat and suggest that Downton Abbey is satisfying because it puts characters who seem to have earned reprimands in their place through the lens of class. The show actually exploits our ingrained class prejudices by aligning them with character development.

Take Thomas, for example. I am not any particular fan of everyone’s manipulative gay former servant, but I thought what happened to him this week was genuinely tragic. I’m with O’Brien that going into the black market is an awfully risky move, but I sympathize with Thomas to a certain extent. What legitimate enterprise would let him get to a place where “I should have enough to go into business properly”? As progressives, our instincts should be to support Thomas in his attempts to rise above a position he believes he’s too clever for—something he may have legitimately proved in his management of Downton Abbey during its period as a convalescent home. When he finds out “I been tricked. I been had. I been taken for the fool that I am,” that ought to be a moment of profound sympathy. Because Thomas has never been given the tools to make his way in legitimate business, he’s particularly vulnerable to such deception. And yet, the show suggests that having concrete ambitions just made Thomas worse. “You made such a point of not being a servant anymore, our ears are ringing with it,” Carson grouses, when Thomas asks if he can stay longer at Downtown. His redemption comes when Carson is felled by Spanish flu, and Thomas takes up his duties, acting as—and retreating into the role of—the perfect servant. The show provides a double message: service is Thomas’s place both because he’s born to it and not to anything else, and because he’s been awful in the past it’s proper penance.

And while I don’t think it’s as overt—or perhaps even as intentional—there are more examples of that kind of setting people back in their proper position, but in a way that suggests it’s more the result of their character than the constrictions of class. Ethel, after busting her way into lunch with the grandparents of her child, can’t come to an accommodation with them that would allow her to stay in her son’s life while also getting financial support for him from them. Cora falls ill with Spanish Flu shortly after she announces she’s going to help Isobel out with her refugee project. Anna stands up for herself with Mr. Bates, telling him “If she can do it, so can we. I have stood by you through thick and thin. Mr. Bates, if we have to face this, than we will face this as huband and wife. I will not be moved to the sidelines..denied the right even to be kept informed. I will be your next of kin. You will not deny me this.” But she’s rewarded for her persistence by seeing her newly-minted husband hauled off to jail. Lavinia, who’s always been more of a plot device than an actual person, is dispatched in a properly ladylike fashion, dying of a broken heart.

The only people who are allowed to transcend class boundaries are Branson and Sybil. And then he’s allowed to move one step up, from chauffer to journalist, a limitation in keeping with our sense that he’s a bit pushy, while she’s required to move many steps down—Lord Grantham is clear that he’ll only help them a little. Because we wouldn’t want to incentivize nobly born young ladies to embrace the idea that things are better when they’re independent and have meaningful things to do with their lives, or as Sybil puts it, ” I don’t want to get used to it. I know what it is to work, to have a full day, and be tired in a good way,” now would we? Violet’s explanation at the end that “The aristocracy have not survived by their intransigence,” and the solution that follows, is the epitome of Downton Abbey’s politics: Branson can be ennobled in character, but not in substance. The nobility may change styles, but their grip on their privilege remains quite firm, thank you.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey spends much of its time exploring changing roles in a world at war, particularly for women. But this week’s episode, one of the best in the season, seemed to me to be particularly good at exploring what choices were and weren’t available to these women we’ve come to know and care about so much, and the way the people around them conspire to limit their choices, ostensibly for their own good. It’s fitting that the episode began with images of Daisy and Mary bound by fate rather than choice as Matthew and William are terribly injured in France. “Someone walked over my grave,” a suddenly stricken Daisy tells Mrs. Patmore, and Mary drops a cup of tea in the drawing room, telling the family startled by her loss of composure that “I suddenly felt terribly cold.”

I wrote two weeks ago that it was awful to see Daisy trapped into marriage by everyone at Downton’s sense of her own good. This week, everyone conspires to make William’s dying wish to wed her before his death come true. “He was happy to think they were true!” Mrs. Patmore says of the lies she encouraged Daisy to tell. Daisy isn’t the only one whose true consent is not considered particularly important. When the vicar worries about a gravely injured William’s ability to truly express his intentions, a riled-up Violet, who’s already taken on the medical establishment and the military, takes him to task. “Can I remind you, William Mason has served our family well? At the last, he saved the life if not the health of my son’s heir,” she lays down the law. “You cannot imagine that we would allow you to prevent this to happen…You living is Lord Grantham’s gift. Your house is on Lord Grantham’s land…I hope you can find some way to overcome your scruples.” In the end, it’s really only William who is thinking of Daisy’s ability to have choices, even if they’re choices after he’s gone, when he says that they should marry so she can have his pension after his death. “It won’t be much, but I’ll know you have something to fall back on,” William tells Daisy, becoming truly worthy of her love, or at least her affection. Seeing Ethel and Jane’s plights in a world without a man, that’s no small thing to leave Daisy, who lacks both those women’s force of personality.

While Daisy’s getting railroaded into a wedding, Lavinia’s being denied the one she badly wants. It’s striking that Dr. Clarkson takes Lord Grantham aside to inform him not just as Lord Grantham says, “You mean there can be no children?” but that there can be “no anything.” The continuation of the family line takes precedence over any individual woman’s happiness. And once again, a man makes decisions that he insists are for a woman’s own good. “I love you so much for saying it,” Matthew tells Lavinia when she insists that despite his paralysis, she wants to be with him. “But there’s something else that may not have occurred to you. We can never be properly married…It’s not important now. But it will be. And it should be.” It’s a terrible knot: there’s something admirable in Matthew insisting that Lavinia has a right to sexual happiness. But it’s dreadfully paternalistic in him making that decision for her despite the fact that she isn’t allowed to have the life experience that would give her the knowledge to weigh all the elements of her choice. “I couldn’t marry her now. I couldn’t marry any woman,” Matthew tells Mary later, revealing the challenge may be less his concern for Lavinia’s well-being than his own self-loathing. “And if they just wanted to be with you?” Mary asks, cleaning up his vomit and tending him with a solicitousness that would have been impossible when we first met her. “On any terms?” “It’s nothing,” Mary tells Isobel of her nursing when Isobel finally arrives at Matthew’s bedside. “Sybil’s the nurse in the family.” But Isobel knows something important has occurred. “It’s the very opposite of nothing,” Isboel insists, referring less to Mary’s specific actions and more to her arrival into being the kind of person who can truly think wisely about her own and other’s happinesses.

Evidence of that inequality between men and women is everywhere. The Major can refuse to acknowledge his child with Ethel and reap nothing but the disapproval of Mrs. Hughes: his ability to choose comes at the price of a double cost to her, the inability to do anything but have the baby, and the choices that event robs her of in the future. As much as Vera Bates is totally the worst, Sir Richard’s manipulation of her is a stark reminder of what happens when the advantages of gender are multiplied by the advantages of money and class (Violet, of course, is a reminder that those same factors can erase the gender gap). And Branson’s continuing to insist that everything rests with Sybil, without really acknowledging the costs she faces, telling her ” Sometimes a hard sacrifice must be made for a future that’s worth having. That’s all I’m saying. It’s up to you.” Would that it were. Would that it may be.

Apologies for the lateness of this post, which contains spoilers through the January 22 episode of Downton Abbey due to Sundance-induced mania.

Ah, Downton Abbey. This week’s episode confirmed my suspicion that this show can be somewhat like its characters, endlessly mired in repetitive plots, but powerful none the less. I’m tired of seeing Thomas and Bates go at each other (though one would imagine Mosley’s disappointment will throw a wrench in that dynamic) and I hope (and suspect) Matthew and Mary’s state of denial will wrap itself up with some haste. But I appreciate Branson calling the question on Sybil, and Isobel calling the question on Cora, with two very different results.

Let’s take the latter first. I’m fascinated by the way Cora has undermined Isobel here, in just one of the many examples of how custom rules even in the unsettled atmosphere of wartime. Cora’s dug into her sense of herself as the lady of the estate, and is using that position to oust Isobel, who undoubtedly has more practical experience and better theories of management, from her post. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I wonder how much of Cora’s positioning here is about genuine interest in veterans and their recovery or the poor and their access to food, and how much of it is about maintaining that self-image, about power. When she tries to avoid a conversation with Isobel, telling her, “Please, can it wait? I have a mountain to get through,” she’s stealing a match on Isobel’s role as the woman with a profession. And her curt dismissal of Isobel’s distress, her declarations that “If I am not appreciated here, I will seek some other place where I will make a difference…I cannot operate where I am not valued,” are a neat co-option of the modern idea of women having meaningful work. Cora is pretending to care about the kinds of emotional needs Isobel introduced her to, even as she’s stripping Isobel of her ability to fulfill them.

In a subtler, and I think less intentional way, Branson does the same thing to Sybil during their second conversation about his love for her. “What work? Bringing hot drinks to a lot of randy officers? It all comes down to whether you love me. The rest is detail,” he tells her. It’s a nasty dismissal of her attempts to become more engaged and to find meaningful work to do. And it’s also part of him sidestepping a larger question about whether his family would embrace her. Branson really is putting a lot of pressure on Sybil, telling her that he’d have open arms for her family when they come around after she marries him, and linking his ability to join the struggle he’s convinced Sybil is important by telling her “Truth is, I’ll stay at Downton until you agree to run away with me.” There’s no question that Mary is wrong in telling Sybil that “That is why one talks to chauffeurs, isn’t it? To arrange journeys by road?” and Violet is being condescending when she warns Sybil about inappropriate wartime friendships. But I hope the show explores the ways in which Branson’s own ordeals are somewhat compromised in the way he’s treating the woman he loves.

And speaking of compromise, I’m curious as to what will happen with Mary and Sir Richard, whose courtship demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of an advancing new age. “This is your beau? A man who lends money then uses it to blackmail the recipient?” Violet asks, horrified, when Mary reveals the real source of Lavinia’s involvement with him. When Mary explains that Sir Richard lives in a “tough world,” Violet wants to know “And you intend to join him?” In a way, it’s a critical question for all three Crawley girls, given that Edith and Sybil have already ventured tentatively into that rougher world on their own terms, and Mary would be the last to join them. That way may lie independence, freedom from past scandal, and perhaps even love. But it does mean leaving things behind, whether it’s the conventions of the gentry, or a family one loves very much. Progress isn’t cost-free.

If you still aren’t watching Raising Hope, Fox’s charming comedy about a working-class family raising Hope, the baby who represents the fourth generation in the same house, together, I’d encourage you to check out last week’s episode and reconsider. In that installment, Jimmy Chance, Hope’s young father, decides to try to go back and get his GED, prompting his parents, Burt and Virginia, to confront their fears about falling behind their son in education. While the way Jimmy finally gets his degree is very funny, the episode is really about teaching people who have never had much in the way of education that learning can be tremendously fun and rewarding. Watching Burt, for example, embrace Shakespeare after Jimmy’s coworker Frank tells him to try to picture the action as it unfolds rather than focusing on individual words is lovely: he ends up transfixed by the fight that opens Romeo and Juliet, and he and Frank fence through the supermarket in made-up weapons and armor. It helps that Garrett Dillahunt is wonderful at selling Burt: as he said at the Television Critics Association press tour, “I love playing the fools. I never understand actors who never want to appear weak. I think that’s where we learn so much about people. I enjoy falling down. I enjoy making mistakes. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t let too much get him down.” It’s Burt’s resilience that makes it particularly rewarding when he gets a win.

And Greg Garcia, the show’s creator, has set up an environment where even when the Chances are doing things that most television characters take for granted, like trying to learn basic math, science, and history, they’re never objects of contempt or ridicule. In a world of aspirational television, where schoolteachers like Jess on New Girl live in vast apartments and even goofy characters like Phil Dunphy on Modern Family are wildly successful, that makes the Chances different, and refreshing, even when it’s not easy to pull off. When we spoke at press tour, Garcia acknowledged that he’s been told that not being aspirational might turn viewers off.

“Those are the shows I like so that’s what I’m going to write. Some people are like, when we first started developing this show, they were like ‘Oh, well, I don’t know maybe the house is too dirty and maybe people don’t want to watch,’” he said. “And I was like ‘They’re not in the house, they’re in their house. They’re just watching.’…I like to go to the zoo and watch the lions. I don’t want to be in there with them…I certainly can’t say that’s not true because maybe it is. But I like the show that I write.”

That’s not an entirely comfortable sentiment. But to a certain extent, it’s what we do when we look upwards, too. We judge the Real Housewives in their plastic, manicured homes just as much as we’re amused and a little shocked when Burt and Virginia refuse to act like functional adults. But while we root for the ludicrously rich to fall, we’re cheering for the Chances to win.

If last week’s Downton Abbey was all about the initial power war has to upset the social order, this week’s episode was about the lingering power of institutions, whether the idea that a man headed off to war is entitled to a sweetheart; the sororicidal battles between women for position; or the ability of the servant class to conduct intense power struggles entirely beyond the notice of their employers. It’s fitting, given that theme, that it seems we’re locked into some old plots this week, as Thomas returns to cause all sorts of trouble at Downton, but with increased capacity to sow dissension now that he can play Cora and Isobel off against each other; Mr. Bates and Anna seem locked in a stalemate by his iron and the pace of English legal proceedings; and Sybil and Branson have trouble understanding each other.

It was awful to see Daisy trapped this week, forced into accepting William’s proposal by Mrs. Patmore’s theories of troop morale, forced by William into announcing their engagement prematurely, and then told by Mrs. Harris that she should stay downstairs because “No, Daisy. Not you. The war has not changed everything.” There’s no question that Daisy is safer at Downton than she might be under other circumstances, but the very things that keep her safe and provided for also keep her trapped. It never occurs to anyone that Daisy might have a mind of her own — in fact, Thomas and O’Brien’s machinations against Mr. Bates last season depended on the idea that her head could be sown with any idea no matter how ludicrous. There’s a real sadness in that belief that could morph into a ruined life if William survives, and Daisy is railroaded into marrying him against her desires.

She’s not the only woman torn between her heart and norms, enforced by both law and society, that govern the behavior of women. When Anna finds Mr. Bates, she’s relieved to find out he’s found grounds for a divorce, but disconcerted by the revelation that “for her to divorce me, she needs something beyond adultery…for a husband, adultery is enough.” But when she ventures that that seems unjust, the force of Bates’ passion barrels past her bloom of a political opinion. “I don’t care about fairness,” Mr. Bates declares. “I care about you.” And he refuses to sleep with her, even when she points out “it’s not against the law to take a mistress, Mr. Bates.” Meanwhile, back at Downton, Ethel’s willingness to be sexually available gets her on Mrs. Hughes’ watch list, but it also lands her a date with a soldier that may put paid to her saucy talk.

While women are at subtle odds in those situations, they’re at outright war when it comes to the struggle between Isobel and Cora for control over Downton in its role as convalescent home, and Rosalind is trying to make a cold war hot by prodding Mary to slander Lavinia and break her engagement to Matthew. The first debate is exacerbated by Thomas, who’s returned to Downton determined to take Carson down a peg and with new power to manipulate the people upstairs. I have mixed feelings about Thomas’s manuverings here — the pilot this season suggested some real growth, so it’s disconcerting to see both him and O’Brien fall into old patterns. I hope there are longer games here that move both of them forward, or tragedies born of their limitations. But it’s fascinating to watch Isobel and Cora go at least other in conversations that come up to the very edge of civility. And of course it’s the civility that matters: one of Cora’s complaints is that Isobel has usurped her place with her servants. Cora has more social pull than Isobel does, while Isobel has more practical skills. It’s Edith, perhaps, who represents a way forward, combining Cora’s graces with Isobel’s unflinching desire to connect, even when it means confronting wounds like the amputation that took Captain Smiley’s hand (I am, for the record, considering him George’s father). Seeing the General call her out for her good deeds gave me hope that Edith will find her own way, a typically middle-child blending of Mary’s conventionality and Sybil’s rebellions.
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I went into this thinking I was going to write about Gemma Teller Morrow, and the Queen herself will definitely get plenty of attention in an upcoming Sons of Anarchy week. But I’m not quite caught up on the show yet, in part because I got distracted along the way by a woman who reminds me a lot of Gemma: the Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. Maggie Smith is a genius, of course, and the Dowager Countess has become one of the most famous and impressive zinger machines in any form of popular culture. But beyond the barbs, Violet is a fascinating model for women in television that upsets the norms on everything from age, to sexual involvement, to deployment of power. Watching her grapple with modernity is one of the most creative and moving long arc plots any network’s put on television in years.

The first and most obvious thing that makes Violet—and consequently her storylines—so different from almost anything else we see on television, is her age, and the corollary to it, her widowhood. Every other woman we’ve talked about in this series has been in her teens and twenties. I spend a fair amount of time arguing that we need to tell stories about women who are single or prioritizing their careers or intellectual commitments over the search for romance, or who are confident who they are instead of going on heroes’ journeys. But it is absolutely true that there are common experiences and processes that people tend to go through during those years, simply by virtue of leaving high school, going to college, and entering the economy. And those stories can vary broadly in the details, but there are powerful tropes about all of those processes, and it’s extremely hard to find something new in them or achieve escape velocity from them. The easiest way to tell different kinds of stories about women is to tell stories about different kinds of women. And while we often talk about different kinds of women in terms of race or class, telling stories about women in different stages of life opens up different arcs and issues.

Unlike questing twenty-somethings, the Dowager Countess of Grantham has a sense of herself that’s been fixed by time and consolidated by money and position. Violet’s beyond sex and marriage—at least for herself—though she’s manifestly confident in the wisdom that experience has given her about both. When she says things about Sybil not being entitled to her opinions “until she is married—then her husband will tell her what her opinions are,” it’s an example of retrograde thinking, but it also comes from a set of developed convictions about how to preserve harmony. Her instruction to Cora that “We are allies, my dear, which can be a good deal more effective,” comes from the same place. She didn’t have the opportunities that her granddaughters do to make errors and recover from them. The rules that govern her life are the result of figuring out what makes life, if not easy, less emotionally difficult.

And it’s fascinating to see what happens when, after someone’s gone through the process of being uncertain and crafting an iron-clad self, the world changes and makes those rules less necessary, even ridiculous. When Violet and Cora talk about how angry Violet gets when her rules are violated, that anger comes out of two very different places. First, breaking the rules by doing things like having premarital sex with Turkish diplomats who die in your bed, carries greater risk in Violet’s world than it does in, say, her granddaughter Mary’s. It makes sense that Violet would be not just disturbed by the mess her granddaughter’s created, but afraid for her. The world is changing such that Mary may survive it (based on what we’ve seen in the American air schedule), but neither she nor Violet know that for sure yet. And second, it must be terrifying to see the world order change around you and to realize that your rules may not be relevant, they may not guide you correctly any longer, and to face, at an advanced age, the prospect of reinventing yourself. That process in your teens and twenties is fantastically difficult, and we like to think that we only have to do it once.
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By Rowan Kaiser

I must admit that I have some wariness about talking about the better female characters of the past for the purposes of laying the groundwork for female characters to compete with the masculine anti-heroes who dominated discussion of “quality television.” It’s not that I don’t want there to be more, better women in important roles on television, but instead that I don’t think female characters have lagged all that far behind men on the best shows of recent years.

However, I do think that the way we define “quality television” indicates a bias that leads towards critics thinking that those masculinity-examining shows are the best. They’re all serious dramas, they’re all on cable, and they’re all (with the exception, perhaps, of The Sopranos) in more traditionally acceptable genres. If we expand out definition of quality to include shows with strong comic elements, shows that aired on networks or netlets, and shows occur in less highbrow settings, things look a lot different. Generally speaking, we can many more fantastic, quality televisions series that feature stronger women than The Wire, etc. Specifically, that criteria opens the door for Veronica Mars to be considered one of the great series of television.

After all, Veronica Mars aired on UPN, a network not historically known for its critical acclaim. It balanced drama with humor, with plenty of quipping as well as some ridiculous premises. And it was about a private investigator who worked in a high school, navigating social strata and relationship drama. It’s also one of the most intelligent shows I’ve ever seen, with one of the strongest protagonists, male or female, in television history.

Three things make Veronica Mars a stellar character: she’s strong enough to be respected, she’s vulnerable enough to be human, and she’s played marvelously by Kristen Bell. Certainly, the show’s writing and supporting cast add to it, but it’s Veronica’s show, even beyond what you might expect from her name adorning the title.
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