Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece franchise about life at a stately British manor, began with the sinking of the Titanic; its recently-concluded second season took on the Great War and the influenza outbreak. It’s a series about people unaccustomed to change suddenly dealing with staggering new technological and sociological realities, those who have long enjoyed a Read More
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Paper Magazine has assembled a gallery of the stars of Downton Abbey stars in and out of costume. Surprises abound! We were shocked to see the following things:
Z’oh my heavens, Mr. Crawley! Terms of Endearment star Shirley MacLaine will be joining the cast of Downton Abbey, which has replaced This Old House and Ken Burns documentaries as PBS’ must-see TV.
Ms. Maclaine will be playing the proud American mom to ex-pat Lady Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) on season 3. (This visit will not go over well with Dame Maggie Smith’s Lady Grantham, we’re sure.)
This news was accompanied by rumors that other stateside cameos might be in the works, so we made several educated guesses as to which American actors could hold their own against the upstairs/downstairs scheming of the McGovern household.
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Downton Abbey, the PBS British acquisition about lives and loves among the British ruling class, has inspired a smaller-scale but equally devoted following of, say, the Twilight series. The series’s presence on Tumblr is far beyond that which its creators could have envisioned was possible for a lengthy period drama–to say nothing of its characters, for whom a typewriter is a terrifying novelty. Read More
In the many, many days since Mad Men last aired, a new star has risen in the quality-television constellation: PBS’s Downton Abbey. The series, depicting love and class struggle in 1910s Britain, was first broadcast on this side of the Atlantic in January 2011 under the Masterpiece imprimatur, but has grown far beyond your Read More
Publishers and booksellers are trying to channel mania for PBS melodrama Downton Abbey into book sales for new Edwardian narratives like Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey and backlist classics like Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford alike, the New York Times reports. Read More
