Downton Abbey Review

The first season arrives with something close to universal acclaim and a genuine idea behind it: an English country house is a workplace, and the show gives the kitchen the same weight as the drawing room. Julian Fellowes knows the period's manners well enough to make an argument about entail law feel urgent, and the production is immaculate, real houses shot with a patience most television will not pay for.

Maggie Smith turns the Dowager Countess into a national event, and Jim Carter, Phyllis Logan and Michelle Dockery do quieter and better work than the series usually gets credit for. Then it becomes a soap. Reviewers who praised the opening run cooled steadily, and the pattern is easy to trace: a character is happy, so a car crashes or a disease arrives or a false accusation surfaces, and the slow decline of the estate stops being the story anyone is telling.

The fourth season is the low point, built almost entirely from manufactured misery, and the plot grade reflects that stretch rather than the opening. The writing keeps its ear for a line while losing its interest in consequence. What never slips is the surface. This is one of the best looking series of its decade, played by a cast far too good for the material handed to them, which is exactly why it stays so easy to keep watching.