“You dreamed a dream, my dear, but now it's over. The world was in a dream before the war, but now it's woken up and said goodbye to it. And so must we.”
As Lord Grantham sits in bed with his wife he recounts the ultimate moral of the second series of Downton Abbey, that their existence is not entirely theirs to determine – it is subject to the government’s choices, society’s ills and public scrutiny.
Downton is a show brimming with historical references, mixed in amongst the dramatic goings-on of daily life in World War I England. It is this sensibility that makes it, besides being the only unaffected soap opera-esque drama around today, one of the most interesting programs on television.
In episode two, we hear reference to Lloyd George, British Liberal Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, and the terrors of the Irish Easter Rising. We see the effects of post-WWI shock on a member of the servant staff. We hear the chauffeur’s dealings within the realm of the political activist, proclaiming himself a “socialist.” All of these events, taken within the setting, create a sense of time and place beyond the plot, yet existing within the story world.
Then comes Wikipedia.
While watching (as the British say) the telly, I am occasionally taken by surprise. A word, a phrase, a pop culture reference pops up in the dialogue and makes the inherently quizzical me decide that my new purpose in life is to find out all that I can about that topic, from Merriam Webster to Urban Dictionary to the mother of all compendiums of knowledge, Wikipedia.
Therefore, it is through television (and internet research) that I have learned about everything from how the Churchill War Rooms were used to why Mary Kay Letourneau is someone you will never want to be compared to. From the historically significant to the undeniably useless, one of the most amazing things that television offers–besides the ability to take you out of the real world and into one of fiction and perhaps fantasy–is that it can throw you right back into reality and make you all the better because of it.
I often say that I learned most of what I know from Gilmore Girls. I have heard tons of good music (Sam Phillips, The Shins, The Ramones), been reminded of some of the greatest movies of all time (Casablanca, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, All the President’s Men) and been introduced to amazing authors (Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath) through that show, and because of it went on to find my own forms of pop culture to absorb and regurgitate in clever wordplay like a Gilmore Girl.
Downton Abbey, like Gilmore, is a show that is rich in plot and character development, as we saw with the burgeoning relationship between Anna and Mr. Bates and the intrigue between Lavinia and Sir Richard Carlisle in this second episode of the second series. But beyond being an insight into the lives of its characters, Downton treats itself like a fascinating preface to a history book.
When Julian Fellowes went on the stage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to receive the Golden Globe for Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television he said, “The whole Downton adventure has been an extraordinary one, like spotting a promising child and waking up to find they've won the Olympics.” Beyond his own expression of gratitude to his audience was this apparent suggestion that Downton is just an inherently great show, when its greatness is actually prescribed not only by the innate quality of its plot, but also by its historical consciousness, brought out by Fellowes’ writing and the cast and crew of the show.
They teach about life during the time of World War I, giving audiences a sense of history and place, but also of societal dealings during this time and the role of gender and station in determining actions and character in Edwardian England and beyond. Instead of doing so in a way that is instructive (par historical documentaries with reenactments) or downright comically incorrect (as if Henry VIII looked anything like Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors), it combines reality and fiction in a way that functions both as entertainment and education.
While the characters of Downton are struggling with their own place in high class English society, seeing their dreams fall by the wayside during the war effort, the show itself is in the opposite place, watching the world embrace it – that’s a dream we needn’t wake up from just yet.