Last week, the news broke that Downton Abbey, the British drama about the titled residents of a major country estate and the people who work for them, will be adding its first black character: the London-born actor Gary Carr, who has a long British television resume, will play a jazz singer named Jack Ross. This is a notable development for Downton Abbey, which through three seasons has remained resolutely—if appropriate to its time period and setting—monochromatic. But the show’s decision is also part of a larger trend of overwhelmingly white shows that have made the decision to try to broaden their casting and their subject matter. And Downton Abbey can learn from Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls, which responded to a firestorm of criticism over its whiteness by adding a character named Sandy (Donald Glover), a black Republican love interest for the main character, and AMC’s Mad Men, which in its sixth season has added two African-American characters and expanded its treatment of its characters reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Downton Abbey, Girls, and Mad Men all differ in the extent to which their settings made the absence of black characters conspicuous or uncomfortable. A relatively secluded English country estate, close to a small town rather than London, would be less likely to have black British or immigrant residents than the capital itself, particularly in 1912. Mad Men has somewhat less excuse than Downton Abbey does, and a number of analysts have suggested that the version of Madison Avenue series creator Matthew Weiner and his collaborators have presented on the show actually suggests that women and African-Americans had made less progress in the advertising industry than they really had, particularly at the firm BBDO. And Girls, which was maligned as racist for having four white main characters, did better than its harshest critics suggested and worse than might have been realistic. The show, set in contemporary Brooklyn, did give its main character Hannah Horvath (Dunham) an Asian coworker at the publishing house where she was a long-time intern, but also relied on stereotyped portrayals of non-white secretaries and nannies, and gave its privileged characters a small, monochromatic social circle. Whether or not that was realistic, or whether or not that was a wise choice on Dunham’s part was a matter of how alienating an individual viewer found the decision, and how much one believed that relatively privileged Oberlin graduates might only have close friends of their same race.

Whether or not Weiner or Dunham felt obligated to have their shows respond to their critics on race, they both did so in ways that made black characters on-screen critics of the white main characters. Dawn (Teyonah Parris), Don Draper’s secretary, who became Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first black employee in the first episode of the fifth season of Mad Men, told a friend she met for dinner this season of her white employers that “Everyone’s scared. Women crying in the ladies’ room. Men crying in the elevator. It’s like New Year’s Eve when they empty the garbage there. There’s so many bottles.” She spoke not just as an outsider to the office but for critics of Mad Men who have found the show alienating and offputting. And Sandy, after failing to finish one of Hannah’s essays on Girls, told her “It wasn’t for me.” When Hannah protested of the essay that “It’s for everyone,” the show was cleverly flipping the script. Sandy, the black character, was saying that a piece of art didn’t have to speak to everyone’s sensibilities, unlike critics of color of the show who were upset that it didn’t address their experiences, while it was Hannah, the white character, who was suggesting that Girls ought to be for everyone, contra many white critics’ defenses that the show’s strength lay in its particularity, and that it couldn’t possibly be reasonable to demand that it serve a universal function.
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According to Vanity Fair, now that Downton Abbey is a bona fide hit in the United States, the show’s creators are planning a major licensing campaign that will include Downton-branded housewares, beauty products, wallpaper and furniture, and clothes. Normally, I mostly look to product deals as an indicator of what’s resonating in American culture more broadly, whether it’s Mad Men‘s relatively high-end fashion deal with Banana Republic, the way Girls cut deals with everything from SoulCycle classes (a favorite of series creator Lena Dunham) to nail polish lines, or the branding power of Sons of Anarchy, which goes largely unacknowledged in the press because it doesn’t involve fashion or beauty. But while it’s not particularly surprising to me that Downton would get franchised like this, these announced plans actually raise a question that’s important for something other than aesthetics and brand power: what are the clothes going to look like?

Part of what makes Downton Abbey visually entertaining to watch is precisely how different the fashions on the show are from contemporary styles—and how they treat women’s bodies differently. Clearly, we’ve lost nothing by moving away from standards of full corsetry and other restricting clothing for women. But as Downton’s timeline has moved forward, the stylish Crawley sisters have liberated themselves from their stays started wearing styles that have dropped waists and that deemphasize their bustlines. Lady Mary’s wedding dress was a perfect example of these kinds of simplified lines:

Lady Sybil’s pants ensemble may have been daring for the time—and may look funny now—but the cut of the pants, at least, is one we’ve seen come back into contemporary styling in recent years, mostly as part of revivals of the eighties:

Mad Men‘s been so influential on commercial fashion in particular (I distinguish this from designer clothing which, in part because it caters to a narrower market, can afford to have a wider range of influences and experiments) because it’s set in one of the eras that we’ve recycled multiple times since the nineties, and because the beauty standards for women at the time, though they allowed for women to weigh more than norms do now, still emphasized the kinds of busts and curves that are still considered desirable, if in adjusted proportions. Downton Abbey, if the clothes licensed from it bear any real resemblance to the things the Crawley sisters wear on the show, would have much longer skirts, men’s-wear-influenced styles that have high necks, and more amorphous silhouettes than a lot of what we’re seeing in mass market fashion. If the show is powerful enough to bend the curve on those kinds of elements, and on the presentation of women’s bodies, that would be a powerful sign of influence indeed.

Over at the Daily Beast yesterday, I wrote about a television phenomenon that officially became a trend over the weekend: the prestige television male virgin. I explained:

On last night’s Game of Thrones, after getting seduced by wildling warrior Ygritte (Rose Leslie), Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) confessed that “There’s been no one else.” Ygritte knew that as a man of the Night’s Watch, the celibate brotherhood who guards the Wall which marks the border of Westeros, Jon was forbidden from having sex after he swore the vows she asked him to break. But she assumed that he’d had sex before he joined up, and was surprised to learn she’d been mistaken. “A maid! You’re a maid,” she teased him.

An hour later on Sunday night’s television line-up, Mad Men copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), whose father sprung a blind date with a pretty schoolteacher on him, confessed during a bout of logorrhea at the diner where he took her that “I’ve never had sex, not even once.” His confession was inexplicable, even to him. “What am I doing?” Ginsberg moaned. “I ordered soup. I just said that.” And Jon and Michael are in good company. Much of the third season of Downton Abbey, which aired on PBS earlier this season, concerned the sexual awakening of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) after he marries Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), ending years of sexual yearning and passing into the realm where, in the words of his bride “all things are permitted.”

As I wrote earlier in our discussion of lies pop culture tells us, one of the biggest is that everyone’s having sex all of the time, and that everyone started having sex sometime late in high school or early in college. It’s worth noting that all three of these stories which have acknowledged that there isn’t a set age at which everyone is miraculously divested of their virginity are in some form or other period pieces. Game of Thrones is set in a world where youthful marriage means that a lot of people do have sex for the first time at a relatively early age, but often not in a truly consensual fashion. Downton Abbey is set in an environment where nice people of both sexes are expected to come to marriage inexperienced, and when the slow burn of sexual tension is a key source of cultural drama. And one of the things that Mad Men captures with great perceptiveness is the uneven arrival of the sexual revolution in different characters’ lives depending on their level of privilege and the conditions of their upbringing.

It would be nice to see some shows attempt to tell similar and similarly respectful stories about characters in contemporary settings, and about women as well as men. High school and college may be the point by which the majority of people have sex for the first time, but they aren’t the only times that people decide to—or get a chance to—have sex for the first time, and there are different concerns and different anxieties about it at different ages. I’m not saying that pop culture should abandon teen and young adult sex stories. But Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Downton Abbey all serve as a reminder that there’s rich material in different kinds of first time stories, whether someone’s having sex for the first time at a different point in their life, or having sex for the first time with a new partner, which can be just as momentous as the first time period.

Over at Vulture yesterday, Margaret Lyons did a great public service, sorting out television dramas that have aired on both broadcast networks and cable this season by which ones featured rape or murder as plot lines, and which ones don’t. Unsurprisingly, the shows that include rape and murder—even as a one-off plot rather than a regularly featured occurrence, as in Nashville—dramatically outnumber the ones that find their stakes elsewhere, 109 to 16. As NPR critic Linda Holmes wrote last year, it’s exhausting to have a world of television where the only stakes that are treated as if they’re worthy of long-form exploration are “avoiding being violently killed.” And so I thought it was worth looking through the list of sixteen shows that haven’t gone to the rape or murder well to see what other kinds of stakes seem to be playing well—or at least moderately well—on scripted drama.

1. The realization of creative ambition: Bunheads, Glee, Smash, The Wedding Band, Nashville, Underemployed, to a certain extent The Newsroom are all shows that fall into this category. Creative ambition works well on television for a couple of reasons. Writing a song or story, preparing for a performance or a broadcast, or going after a contract or a part is an essentially procedural process: it has a beginning, middle, and an end point. Having creativity as the stakes also lets television dramas do what the most popular reality shows of the modern era of TV have done: invest audiences in big musical performances. Creativity shows run into trouble, just as reality programs like American Idol do, when they try to sell us on people who aren’t compellingly talented on their own merits, as has been the case with Smash, and is true to a certain extent with the dramatic overemphasis on the goodness of Will McAvoy in The Newsroom. But just as murder and sexual assault turn ordinary people into people who are worthy of dramatic consideration by injecting extraordinarily high stakes into their lives, creativity shows focus on people to whom we assign an extraordinary amount of societal capital in real life.

2. Period pieces: We’ve got a modest, but not extraordinarily large number of period dramas on television right now: Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and The Carrie Diaries. And it’s no mistake that three of those four shows air on PBS, which has built its brand in part in opposition to the prevailing winds of television, and is ahead of the curve on programming to viewers who are burned out on violent storylines elsewhere. It’s also done so with imports: Downton and Call The Midwife are both British shows that PBS has the rights to air. Other period shows, like The Americans, make heavy use of violence. But situating characters in the past tends to lend a sheen of significance to ordinary lives by letting those characters stand in for larger forces. Lady Mary and Cousin Matthew may be just ordinary rich people we’d find sort of irksome if they were will-they-or-won’ting-they through the twentieth century. But from a distance of decades, the reasons that it took them so long to get together, questions about their relative sexual experience, and the importance of Lady Mary’s pregnancy become unfamiliar and newly exciting.

3. Family stories: This is a category that comedy seems to be doing better, or at least with greater frequency, than drama at the moment. But NBC’s Parenthood, and ABC Family’s Switched at Birth have both been useful illustrations of how making whether or not family gets along or holds together or finds its way together can elevate other conflicts. Parenthood and Switched At Birth have been staging grounds for all kinds of other stories, including recognition of creative ambition plotlines, political involvement arcs, and illness and autism stories. If audiences get hooked by what happens when individual characters’ actions influence their group of friends, the consequences are even more significant when their actions can blow up or restore the bonds of family.

4. Procedurals with below-death stakes: In this group fall the quickly-cancelled Emily Owens M.D. and the hardier Necessary Roughness, Suits, and The Client List. The middle two are USA Network shows, which, with its Blue Sky brand, works somewhat like PBS in programming to people who want a different, but relatively predictable, tone from much of what they’re offered on networks and cable. Often the problems characters face on USA’s procedurals are engaging precisely because they’re sort of silly, or because the people who have the problems are silly, or because the means in which they’re resolved are silly. Maybe the cure for television’s rape and murder epidemic isn’t just getting more creative about the stakes involved, but in how main characters solve crimes or medical problems and reach resolutions.

This post discusses plot points throughout the third season of Downton Abbey.

It’s profoundly irritating that Downton Abbey was railroaded into perhaps the most soap operatic ending in its existence by Dan Stevens’ demand to be let out of the show. Having Matthew run off the road by a country burgher driving a truck down a narrow road, the accident perhaps facilitated by Matthew’s distractingly powerful joy over the birth of his son and heir, is a cheap solution to a problem created by Stevens’ assessment of his market value, an event without any of the larger points or ideas that normally attach to developments at Downton Abbey, even in a superficial way. It’s cruel to see the show reach a logical, happy closing point, only to torpedo it: “We’ve done our duty. Downton is safe. Papa must be dancing a jig,” Mary told him when she presented their child to him in the hospital. “I’m dancing a jig!” her husband declared. “I feel like I’ve swallowed a box of fireworks.”

But as irksome as it is to see Downton succumb to its sudsiest instincts, Matthew’s death raises a fascinating question that the show has been unable to pose before. Who is Lady Mary, and what does she want, now that she’s not required to secure Downton Abbey’s financial future or line of succession. Without those obligations, Mary’s sisters were able to explore various answers to those queries, from nursing, to Branson, to Sir Anthony, to a newspaper column, to Mr. Gregson. Mary was turned sour by her inability to even consider what she might want, lead into misadventure with Mr. Pamuk, and only after marrying Matthew, found a version of herself that both let her fulfill her responsibilities and that she actually liked. “I hope I’m allowed to be your version of Mary Crawley for all eternity,” she told Matthew, immediately before his death. But who is Mary’s version of herself? What is the life she can be pleased with that she’s also truly chosen? And what can she choose, now that she has a child, and the time her sisters spent in various experiments has passed her by? As irritated as I am by Matthew’s death, this is genuinely rich dramatic territory, and I’m encouraged to see Downton explore it, along with the fact that Lord Grantham is left with Branson as his only son-in-law, and one he might find acceptable in comparison to Michael Gregson as Edith’s lover.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of Downton Abbey.

Last night’s super-sized Downton Abbey was a bit lumpy in places—the cricket match in particular felt like it might have been a richer subject several seasons down the line when we had a better sense of who actually lives not just upstairs and downstairs, but in the village. But the combination of two episodes that aired as individual hours in the UK let Downton ground Thomas’s story in a larger context of the ways in which sexual repression poorly serves men and women alike in 1920s England. As O’Brien conspires to lure Thomas to Jimmy’s room, Edith finds herself drawn to Gregson, and Matthew worries about his potential fertility, this episode was a reminder that, medically and socially, an inability to speak honestly about sex has terrible consequences.

Edith’s latest romantic adventures begin as professional ones. After Gregson writes her to inquire again after her availability as a columnist, she declares “I think I will go. It seems rude not to, in a way. And I haven’t been to London for ages.” Her family continues to be less than entirely supportive. As her grandmother puts it, “A woman’s place is in the home, but I see nothing wrong in her having some fun before she gets there. And another thing, Edith isn’t getting any younger. Maybe she isn’t cut out for domestic life.” But as it turns out, confining a woman to domestic life might also keep her from running across promising romantic prospects. When she and Gregson meet for lunch, Gregson admits to her “Am I allowed to say I’m pleased you’re not married?” “I’m a little less pleased,” Edith tells him. But she doesn’t leave the lunch and she takes the job—and she doesn’t quit it when Gregson remarks “You look very pretty today. I’m not sure how professional it is for me to point that out.”

It’s a relationship that brings out the best in both of them. Edith dares not just to write, but to take on subjects that no one would have expected her, like the lack of employment opportunities for soldiers returned home from the war, not all of whom are so lucky to amble into managing an estate, as Matthew has done. “I like the idea of a woman taking a position on man’s subject,” Gregson tells her. “I think we’re on to something new, here. The mature female voice in debates.” And it’s good for them personally—to a point. Edith comes out of her shell enough to enjoy a flirtation and to talk honestly about her experience being jilted. Gregson clearly enjoys her company as a colleague and as a woman. But when she inquires into his background, she discovered not just that he’s married, but how English law has inconvenienced him. Gregson is a decent man, but there’s something profoundly unfair about the law that shackles him to his wife because she’s too mentally ill to give consent to their divorce, and there appears to be no treatment that can make her well enough to set him free. Sir Anthony hurt Edith horribly because he couldn’t bear to tell her in a definitive way that he didn’t actually feel comfortable being with her. Gregson at least finds the courage to tell her the truth, but not after leading her down a disappointing path. What happens next may depend on how comfortable Edith feels defying convention. It’s one thing for her flighty cousin to convince herself a married member of the nobility is going to leave his wife for her, and another to go into a relationship like this one with your eyes open.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 3 episode of Downton Abbey.

This is one of the few times that Downton Abbey has picked up almost exactly where the previous episode left off, but despite the attention that the hour pays to how Sybil’s death is resonating through her family, it’s one that raises a more interesting question: how do you wrench yourself out of the station you’ve spent your entire life occupying? For the most part, the show answers that question in a rather old-fashioned way, by suggesting that good intentions and concern for others can provide you with a path forward, but only if you’re brave enough to take it.

Ethel, struck anew by the loss of her own child after Sybil’s death, is determined to do right by her patroness by improving the cooking that Isobel finds inedible, even correcting for her grief. She enlists Mrs. Patmore’s help, and the doughty cook defies Carson’s edict to avoid Crawley House as long as Ethel is present to help her with salmon mousse, pork chops, and a pudding. “You’ve done well, Ethel. Maybe you’ve also done yourself a favor,” Mrs. Patmore tells Ethel of her hard work.

And Ethel’s attempts to make a place for herself inspire other small rebellions among the Grantham women. When Robert storms in and demands that they leave lunch where Ethel is serving, Cora makes the subtext of her complaint against her husband clear, declaring “Robert frequently makes decisions based on values that have no relevance anymore.” And Violet’s response makes plain her strength, using the acid linguistic dexterity of the nobility to sneak hard truths into the conversation, and telling her son—while also affirming the quality of Ethel’s cooking—”It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding.” And back at home, Mary identifies her father’s actual concern, and the reason he’s doing something he might never have done in another circumstance: humiliating someone in service. “You’re angry, but not with Isobel or Ethel,” Mary, always her father’s favorite, tells him. “I think you’re angry because the world isn’t going your way, at least not anymore.” Even the most conservative member of the Crawley family is willing to defend Edith’s reach for something better.

Then there’s Daisy, who has always been reluctant to benefit from William’s death. First, she was uncomfortable accepting his pension, even though marrying him on his deathbed, despite her ambivalent feelings for him, let him die with a measure of peace. Now, she’s offered an even more significant chance at independence than that small supplement to her income: William’s father wants to make her his heir. “There are widows who take on a tenancy. And you’re liked the in big house. They’ll not refuse you,” he tells her, encouraging her to strike out on her own. “My dream would be if you were to come here and live with me so I could teach you.” It’s not just that he’s telling her she can dream better of the life in service she just always assumed was her: she has to. “You’ve forty years of work ahead of you,” he cautions. “Do you think great houses like Downton Abbey are going to go on for forty years? Because I don’t.” It’s a fascinating opportunity: Daisy’s being presented with a rare chance to bolt for a higher class status. The question is whether she’s bold and ambitious enough to take it, overcoming her own anxieties about seeming greedy or grasping.

And then there’s Edith, still considering whether to take the offer of a column, and contemplating other small usefulness in the meantime. “I sometimes wonder if I should learn to cook,” she ponders. “You never know. It might come in handy someday.” And while she’s not an outspoken advocate in this matter, she sticks to her chair at lunch at Crawley House, refusing to abandon Edith, Isobel, or her mother. Hopefully she can be inspired by the women below her in station, who live on a narrower margin, and who are reaching for gains for smaller than anything she already possess. All Edith can grab for is her own happiness. But it’s no less valuable a goal.

This post discusses plot points through the January 27 episode of Downton Abbey.

I was on the road when the January 20 episode of Downtown Abbey aired, so this week, I’ll consider both hours of television together. And while the show does have a tendency to skip around—in time, in location, in tone and quality—these two episodes, taken together, offer up a strong illustration of the difficulties of making yourself heard, whether it’s across the gender barrier, upwards across class lines, or through an arbitrarily-imposed bureaucracy. The consequences of those enforced silences, as we saw this weekend, are fatal.

Anna and Bates’ story has fairly definitively stalled out for me at this point in Downton Abbey‘s run, but Bates’ stint in prison has been a nice little parallel to events at Downton itself. He’s a different kind of downstairs now, bound by a different set of social constraints. Inmates have different routes to influence than they did in the big house, where service to one of the principals of the household gave them direct access to air their opinions, if they were carefully stated. And the principals of the household had been raised from childhood to be used to having power, and to exercising it in certain ways, whether it’s to smooth the advancement of certain members of the household staff within the house, or to make interventions in their health and welfare outside the realm of service, as with the surgery for Mrs. Patmore’s contacts or Cora’s promise that Mrs. Hughes would be provided for even if cancer treatment failed to prove effective. But in prison, the guards and wardens are new to power and are primarily concerned with aggregating it. Where the Downtown residents’ acts of kindness to the people they have power over don’t constitute a wholly reliable social safety net or engine of upward mobility, they at least provide a reliable set of cues about incentives and rewards. In prison, something like the withholding of Bates’ letters is meant to enforce the arbitrary nature of his position, to encourage him to be utterly cowed lest he break an unwritten rule or violate a norm. It’s yet another one of Downton‘s reminder that however limited the opportunities are for people in service, falling out of that hierarchy can be even worse.

But it’s one thing to fall out of a hierarchy that provides you with a minimum of status, and another to reach the top of your privilege and find that some of the marginal gains aren’t worth the sacrifice that goes along with them. After Lady Edith found herself jilted at the altar and committed herself to a useful spinsterhood, I emailed a friend that I thought she might break out of society’s role for her, albeit in a more sedate way than Sybil had by eloping. Some of her initial changes are small. “Why don’t you have breakfast in bed?” Matthew asks her when she comes down to dine with him and Lord Grantham. “Because I’m not married,” Edith tells him shortly. It’s a position that provides her with some embarrassment, but it also puts her in the position of being the lone young woman in company with the men of her household, and in a position to voice frustrations about things like suffrage. “I don’t have the vote,” she tells Matthew, bitterly. “I’m not over 30 and I’m not a householder. It’s ridiculous.” His suggestion that she write to the Times may be flip, but it’s certainly more productive than Lord Grantham’s reminder that Edith really ought to talk to Cora about how she can help with the evening’s dinner. The Dowager Countess may tell Edith that “You’re a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining, and find something to do,” but I don’t know if she recognizes that dinners and local charitable patronage still might leave Edith empty.

And so there’s something tremendously exciting about seeing Edith take Matthew’s advice, and for once, get rewarded for making extra effort by the Times, if not by her family. “No lady writes to a newspaper,” Violet declares, before amending that statement to remind Edith that one who does is “A Churchill. The Churchills are different.” Cora tells Edith that “It’s good to have strong views, but noteriety is never helpful.” In other words, Edith is entitled to her feelings, but not the exercise of them, and should accept her gilded cage. And when the letter is published, under the title “Earl’s Daughter Speaks Out For Women’s Rights,” Edith may still be categorized by her relationship to her father, but for once, she’s using that power to get what she wants, instead of letting it define her sphere of influence. So what if “That’s what he’s buying, your name and your title,” as Lord Grantham puts it: Edith is getting something out of the bargain, too.

And as it turns out, “the problems faced by the modern woman rather than the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” aren’t an “even so.” They become urgent when Sybil goes into labor and Lord Grantham quashes the voices of women and Dr. Clarkson when it comes to their care, opting for class and gender solidarity instead. It’s awful to hear Lord Grantham say “I don’t want to hurt Sir Phillip’s feelings,” as if that were the most important issue at stake here, even when it seemed like Sybil’s delivery would go normally. And it’s worse to find out that Sir Phillip is essentially in agreement with Lord Grantham on the importance of his own expertise and status. His snapping at Dr. Clarkson, who has know Sybil her entire life, “Maybe she has thick ankles. Lots of women do,” is the Downton equivalent of advocating an aspirin between the knees as a contraceptive. It’s a refusal to see Sybil as a specific person, and to embrace the actual practice of medicine in favor of the performance of sagacity. And it kills her.
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This post discusses plot details from the January 13 episode of Downton Abbey.

As I was discussing last week’s episode of Downton Abbey and its opening of a larger discussion about the economic role of the estate with a friend, he pointed out something that’s absolutely true. Downton may provide a lot of employment opportunities, but the show about the house is also a story about how the remnants of a feudal economic system shut certain people out of playing productive roles that could have made good use of their talents. Women, in Downton Abbey, are objects of trade rather than economic actors: they’re passed from father to husband, with money attached. And while Lady Mary is suited to make the best and most of that transactional role, and Sybil escaped it by marrying out of the economic system proscribed for women, there’s no better illustration of the waste this system produces than Lady Edith.

Edith’s chasing after Sir Anthony has made her something of a joke, both in her family, and in the show, for three seasons. But for the very reason that it seems ridiculous that Edith would marry an old, wounded man, it makes sense that she is attracted to him, particularly given the way her freedom to work and to be out in the world contracted after the end of the war. His physical infirmities give Edith more to do in their marriage than an able-bodied husband would: she’ll have to care for him, his house to renovate, their family to represent in the world. The Dowager Countess may insist that “Edith is beginning her life as an old man’s drudge. I should thought a large drawing room no compensation.” But that drudgery is better than life as a simple, dumb ornament.

It’s interesting to see Edith try to reassure herself in the runup to the wedding that this is enough, even if it doesn’t compare in excitement to smooching a farmer in his barn, or to driving herself. “Something happening in this house is actually about me,” she declares, in both a commentary on her actual role in Downton Abbey, and in a family where her marriage rates only the local minister, her reputation has been expendable enough to allow her to work outside the home in extraordinary circumstances, and where she lacks the courage to reach for a real rebellion. ” All of us married, all of us happy, and the first baby on the way,” she tells her sisters the morning of her wedding, having caught up to them in their wedded state, if not having found the sort of self-actualization in marriage that Mary and Sybil did. Even as Anthony jilts her, she’s both trying to convince him and herself, begging “We’re so happy, aren’t we? We’re going to be terribly, terribly happy.”

They might have been a little bit happy. But the Dowager Countess is right when she tells Edith “Don’t stop him, doing the only sensible thing he’s come up with in months.” And in her humiliation comes a kind of power. Edith may despair to her mother when she tells Cora, “Look at them, both with their husbands. Sybil pregnant. Mary probably pregnant. Oh, Mama.” But Cora is right when she promises her daughter “You are being tested. And do you know what they say, my darling? Being tested only makes you stronger.” Edith may still be in despair when she tells Anna that the only thing she wants anyone to bring her is “A different life.” But she provides her own answer when she tells Anna that she won’t stay in bed because “I’m a useful spinster, good at helping out. That is my role. And spinsters get up for breakfast.”

“Useful spinster” may not cary as much social capital in Edith’s world as Duchess of Grantham, the title Lady Mary will inherit, or even as mother, a role available to Sybil even if she’s cast off the position she had as a child to become Mrs. Branson. But it’s a much more liberated position, carrying with it the potential for a life that has much more potential for excitement in it than tearing around the country at high speed. I can’t wait to see Edith embrace it.

This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the third season of Downton Abbey. If you’ve seen subsequent episodes aired in the UK and want to discuss events that happen in them, please flag your comments as such.

Much of the discussion of the residents of Downton Abbey, the great house at the heart of Julian Fellowes’ series of the same name, is whether things ought to change. Much of the tension of the series comes from the fact that, no matter what anyone might wish on the subject, change is coming anyway. And after a season of Downtown Abbey that felt stuck, and in some cases silly, I’m glad to see change, both much-desired in the form of Mary and Matthew’s wedding, and greatly feared in the form of the loss of Cora’s fortune to a bad investment, come to the characters and the series itself.

One of the most intriguing new additions to the show in this episode was the discussion of Downton’s role in the larger economy of the region. It’s telling, of course, that the characters themselves have never really discussed their larger obligations as job creators until they’re faced with an existential threat to the continuation of their own privileges—much like the billionaires who found themselves deeply aggrieved by the tone of the latest presidential election. And it’s even more intriguing that Downton Abbey itself, despite its continual feints in the direction of class, has avoided this obvious source of both personal and societal drama until now.

But it makes sense that we’ve gotten there, even by a belated way. If life at Downton Abbey seems feudal, that’s because in a fundamental way it is. Robert may not be directly renting land grants and cottages to villagers in exchange for silver pennies and chickens, passing some share of the profits up to the king in the form of wax candles, grain, and coin, as his ancestors would have done. But he’s overseeing an estate that is meant to be a linchpin in the local economy, and an economic intermediary between the people and their government. And in his meeting with his banker in London, it’s clear he feel that responsibility powerfully. “I refuse to be the Earl who dropped the torch and let the flame go out,” he insists. “The estate must be a major employer and support the house, or there’s no point to it. To any of it.” That’s not to say that he’s solely concerned for the welfare of the poorer people in his orbit. But without the ability to generate jobs, Downton isn’t just economically unviable—it will come to be seen as morally indefensible to the people who have previously accepted its paternal influence on the region.

Or as Violet puts it at dinner with the family, her bluntness in service of a useful honesty, “It’s our job to provide employment. An aristocrat without servants is as much use of the county as a glass hammer,” a beautiful, profoundly stupid object. I’d argue that Downton Abbey is a relatively conservative show, one that likes to set up radicals and reformers like Branson, and to a lesser extent, Lady Edith, as naive and ineffectual. Even Branson finds himself pulled into another way of seeing things as he’s absorbed into the family, telling Matthew the night before his wedding “It’s strange I’m arguing about inherited money and saving estates. The old me would like to put a bomb under the lot of you.” But this episode mounted as effective a version of the job creators’ argument for the maintenance of their privilege as it’s possible to make, largely because we actually like someone like Lady Mary vastly more than we like Charles and David Koch, and thus are more receptive to her insistence that “I shall be Countess of Grantham one day, and in my book, the Countess of Grantham lives at Downton Abbey.”
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