THE PLOT THUS FAR
Including 52 minutes of exclusive footage not available anywhere else, the new Downton Abbey: Seasons 1, 2 & 3 Deluxe Limited Edition (Amazon Exclusive) contains never-before-seen deleted scenes from Seasons 1-3, all-new cast interviews, and 11 minutes of clips and interviews from Season 4!
Welcome to Downton Abbey, the splendid ancestral home of the Earl and Countess of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) and their daughters, who live there under the watchful eye of the Dowager Countess (Dame Maggie Smith). The household is a complicated community, with the servants below stairs as fiercely jealous of their ranks as anyone above. From the sinking of the Titanic to the First World War, the secure and ordered world of Downton is rocked as the lives of the inhabitants are shaped by romance, ambition, and heartbreak.
Enjoy this collection of seasons 1, 2 and 3 of the Golden Globe® and multi-Emmy Award®-winning, Guinness World Record-holding (highest critical review rating for a TV show), most talked-about program in recent memory, including the Season 2 Christmas episode and the Season 3 finale episode “A Journey to the Highlands.”
This Blu-Ray set features subtitles in English (SDH).
WHAT WE THOUGHT
The Countess doesn’t know what a weekend is, while the family struggles to find a suitor to produce a wealthy heir. Elizabeth McGovern impresses as the sole American in the cast, while the best of the British crop shake off their Hogwartian cobwebs. Needless to say, this is the most impressive show handled by PBS in twenty five years. I’m not one for costume dramas, but the material rises above that standard. It’s a group dynamic that Americans aren’t accustomed to, but the dashes of subtle class warfare are very appropriate for our society.
In a world of badly shot dramas this at least is shot with care – usually. The women make sure to wear different clothes each week, with the camera often treating them like clothes horses for viewers to admire. The villains are suitably diabolical and the goodies suitably wonderful, often to a laughable degree. The men are marginalised figures who exist to provide the women with drama, permitting the largely female viewing audience a little wish fulfillment. With the advent of the Great War there are even hideously bad war scenes to keep male viewers happy. And for once the drama is conducted without shouting, which was a refreshing for my ears. Modern viewers can admire the lovingly recreated clothes, machines and surrounding and bask in a more civilised era, with the social and physical realities subtly altered to make them more pleasing to the modern mind.
The strict plot details in Downton are standard soap: an entailment conundrum, a surprise heir, daughters that need to find suitable husbands, etc. There’s also a splash of Upstairs/Downstairs thrown in, as considerable time is spent on the lives of the hired help, but these are even less interesting than the lives of the rich people. Modern soap operas are often derided – and justly so – for their ludicrous story lines and unceasing devotion to superficiality, and yet, somehow, when the same type of ludicrous storyline is wrapped up in the veneer of “costume drama,” and set in the recently distant past, otherwise rational people shut off their brains and accept the wooden dialogue, implausible situations, and inane banalities without question. It’s fascinating how the sight of a corset or a horse-drawn carriage is apparently all one needs to disable a human brain.
“Downton Abbey” enters its third season with enough period pomp to inspire Americans to love what the British are starting to ignore. Maggie Smith is in a world of her own on this show, but that’s not to play down the work of the others. Most of the season is Maggie Smith bitching back and forth with Cora’s Aunt. We do get some moments with Bates, but everything just feels like a setup to get rid of undefined cast members. I’m not going to spoil anything, but there it is. However, something has been bugging me during this season.
Series creator Julian Fellowes is not defending slavery, of course, but the arguments are always the same, no matter the social “reconfiguration” taking place. Hence, slavery is good because slave owners take care of their slaves, aristocracy is good because the aristocracy takes care of their servants, and capitalism is good because employees take care of their laborers. What each argument does, regardless of historical time period, is posit the lower classes as dependent on power without questioning how and why this power is structured, created and propagated in the first place.
The Blu-Ray comes with Season 3 specific featurettes and the bonus Christmas Special. Hell, the Christmas special might be one of my favorite episodes of the series. The A/V Quality is pretty sharp with an appropriate DTS-HD 2.0 master audio track. The 1080p transfer is clean enough. You also get some repackaged featurettes that cover a wide range of the production. There’s also a tourism spot for the United Kingdom, but it’s nothing major. Plus, there’s a bonus sneak at Season 4 starting in January 2014.
You also get a bonus documentary about Highclere Castle.Do you watch “Downton Abbey”? Would you like to learn more about the center piece house? Behold this sixty minute love-letter to the biggest cash cow since PBS learned that England makes television series without commercials. There is a rudimentary history lesson to be learned about England, but it’s in such small doses. Honestly, this documentary would’ve been better suited as a special feature for the next Downton Abbey season release. It’s compelling, but it’s not a strong enough draw for a standalone release. In the end, I’d recommend a purchase for the complete set.
RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW!