The DVD showed up 10 days before Christmas, an unexpected “gift” as desirable as it was disconcerting for me to possess.
I immediately dropped it like a hot potato on my editor’s desk. A small part of me hoped he’d destroy it. Yet another part — the part that knew he was as hooked on “Downton Abbey” as I — hoped that by slipping him Season 2 nearly a month before it starts airing on PBS tonight, I’d be in line for a massive salary bump.
Clearly, I was having my own dowager countess moment.
For the millions of “Downton Abbey” fans here and in Great Britain, that phrase requires no explanation. “Downton” — the shorthand reference for both the series, a co-production of England’s Carnival Films and PBS’ “Masterpiece” franchise, and for the sprawling English country estate where the action takes place in the early 1900s — is about many things: An aristocratic family upstairs dealing with high-stakes generational change; a lively pack of servants downstairs who are in and out of all manner of people’s business; modernization versus the “old ways” of doing things, etc.
Above all, though, the addictive drama is about people angling for what they think is rightfully theirs. No one more so than the hilariously judgmental dowager countess (Oscar winner Maggie Smith at her wittily acerbic best).
Whenever she’s not sticking muttered, Twitter-length knives in the backs of arrivistes, Americans and anybody else she considers beneath her (no matter their social class) the mother of the current Earl of Grantham is scheming to keep Downton and its considerable fortune firmly within her immediate family’s grasp.
Smith won an Emmy for her performance in Season 1, which aired here last winter. That was one of six Emmys scooped up by “Downton” — including best miniseries or movie, where it notably cleaned hipster HBO’s clock — thereby providing still more evidence that the 40-year-old “Masterpiece” was not so creaky after all. The franchise’s ratings shot up an astounding 32 percent in 2011, much of it due to “Downton,” which in its first season on PBS (PBS!) was watched by a “CSI” audience-sized 13 million people.
The love affair is equally intense here. When GPB in Atlanta emailed supporters about a Season 2 preview screening held at its Midtown headquarters last week some 400 people RSVP’d “yes” that same day, according to Nancy Zintak, vice president for marketing. When PBA-30 planned its own preview party for one night last week, so many people wanted to come that Atlanta’s second, smaller PBS station had to add a second night.
Some guests undoubtedly were attracted by the chance to pose for photos alongside a giant cutout of Smith as the dowager at the GPB party. But many more likely were dying like a Turkish diplomat in Lady Mary’s bed for a hint of what was about to unfold in Season 2.
Among the most pressing questions:
● Will that sexual “indiscretion” stay dead and buried along with the aforementioned Turk? Or will it come back to ruin Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery, slyly sympathetic as the eldest daughter who’s seemingly “doomed” to a fate of making a great, if stiflingly dull marriage) and others at Downton?
● Will her father, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville, grace personified as he realizes that the sun is gradually setting on his kind) still honorably refuse to break the “entail,” which, upon his death, gives Downton to a distant, middle-class male relation? Despite the fact that by waging a modernist fight against England’s time-honored inheritance laws, he could conceivably better provide for Downton’s upstairs and downstairs “families”?
● Will Thomas (two-facedly handsome Rob James-Collier), the sneering, scheming footman who’d angled his way into an upwardly mobile gig as an Army medic at the end of last season, survive the German Hun’s menacing tactics in World War I? And vice-versa?
Yes, I now know the answers to all these questions (well, at least I know more than most people do, having watched the first three episodes of Season 2).
And, no, I’m not about to tell you.
Please. It’s bad enough that I have to know any of it ahead of time.
One of Season 1’s most unexpected pleasures was the sense of anticipation we felt about watching television again. Maybe even for the first time. Indeed, if you’d grown up in a 300-channel world, where new episodes of “The Walking Dead” or “Hot in Cleveland” repeat multiple times daily and you can jump to the funniest “Saturday Night Live” bits via TiVo or Twitter, “Downton’s” notion of “appointment television” must’ve felt quaintly anachronistic.
But ultimately how delicious! Imagine: We all simply had to wait for each 90-minute episode to unfurl Sunday nights. Nor was there much chance to catch up on what one had missed by not actually being there in front of the TV when host Laura Linney opened each telecast by understating, albeit with a dignified twinkle in her eye, “This is ‘Masterpiece Classic.’ ”
Even the fact that PBS is commercial-free added to that in-the-moment sense of exhilaration. For 90 minutes (90 minutes!) we had to ignore our growling stomachs or increasingly full bladders to learn what would happen when Mrs. Patmore, the cook who was secretly going blind, accidentally salted a visiting lord’s dessert. Or if Lady Sybil, the earl’s forward-thinking youngest daughter, would return from her furtive visit to a raucous political rally unchanged, let alone alive.
Having the period drama slowly parceled out each week on our state-of-the-art HD flat screens must’ve been a bit like living on a large country estate at the turn of the last century: Change was coming on fast enough in the form of automobiles, electric lights, crumbling class divisions and a vibrant free press that everyone could feel a bit like lord of the manor at times. But not so fast that it completely upended the old order or eliminated all sense of anticipation and surprise about life’s twists and turns.
Again this season, each episode will air without commercial interruption, on Sunday nights on GPB (tonight’s opening episode is a full two hours) and two Fridays later on PBA. Again, too, the repeats are kept to a bare, pre-cable era minimum. So is it any wonder that when the Season 2 DVD recently came back into my possession, I felt a bit like Carson, Downton’s old-school butler, who’d greeted the arrival of a telephone at the estate with a mixture of awe and dread?
“I think you should write about this,” said my editor, who’d watched the first few episodes (but not, it should be pointed out, even mentioned a salary bump). “It’s really good.”
Yes, it is. In fact, the first three episodes suggest that Season 2 will be even better, more entertaining and thought-provoking than last season’s debut. Set against the backdrop of World War I, in which everyone upstairs and downstairs does or doesn’t “serve” in some way, this season is all about duty, honor and courage. In certain sectors of “Downton Abbey,” those ideals play out differently than they ever have before. Meanwhile, nobody is as all good or all bad as Season 1 may have led viewers to believe. Not even the scheming Thomas.
And no, I’m not about to tell you any more than that. I can’t.
Duty, honor and courage are all well and good. But I’m done ruining my Sunday evenings by watching any more episodes ahead of time for you folks.
Surely the dowager countess would approve.
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On TV
“Downton Abbey”
9 p.m. Sundays on GPB (starts tonight)
9 p.m. Fridays on PBA-30 (starts Jan. 20)
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