Archive for the ‘Downton Abbey’ Category

My, my, have I set the bar high for myself: Not only am I up at the crack of dawn blogging away, coffee at hand, but – so as to not taint or influence myself in any way – I categorically refuse to read any other DA recaps before I write my own. (Please wait until I wrap it all up before bursting into applause.)

I promised a brief synopsis of Season 1 before diving into Season 2, and here goes:

There is an impossibly well-mannered English clan, the Crawleys-slash-Granthams (the name thing is a tad confusing, just run with it as I bounce back and forth between Crawley and Grantham), living in a house in the Brit equivalent of the sticks. Flawlessly manicured, but the sticks nonetheless. This house, Downton Abbey, is roughly the size of Texas.

The spectacular estate has been in the husband’s family for generations. But as Lord Grantham is house-rich and cash-poor, he and the three Crawley daughters have been utterly reliant on the wealthy American mama’s inheritance to stay afloat. And since there are no lads in the familial lineup, something called an “entail” is now being invoked against the property. In short, it means that either one of the three girls (Lady Mary, Horrible Lady Edith or Lady Sybil) must marry someone rich enough to handle the expenses of Downton Abbey, or the house is duly handed over to Distant Cousin Matthew, The One With The Piercing Blue Eyes.

It’s beyond-important to me that I refer to him, at least on first reference, as Distant Cousin Matthew. Why? Because the Crawleys are determined to marry Lady Mary off to him. And here in the States, cousin-marrying is very much frowned upon. But now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I will say this: Matthew is lovely, and Mary should have said yes to his proposal. But she didn’t. And that refusal, plus a few other tidbits I’ll weave in as I go along, is by far the most important plot point of Season 1. Selfish but glamorous Mary has put the family’s entire future in jeopardy. This is not good.

Damn you, Mary.

Season 2, Episode 1

Two years have elapsed since we last set eyes on the Crawleys, and England is embroiled in World War 1. Matthew has been pressed into service, at a very high rank, which means he is pretty much bossing all the soldiers around. But he can’t escape doing time in the trenches, and it’s safe to say that the whole thing completely flips him out.

And why wouldn’t it? He’s an attorney by trade, and is about to inherit a drop-dead gorgeous estate that is, as I’ve already noted, rawther large.

It seems Matthew has not spent much time lamenting the fact that Mary wouldn’t marry him. Instead, he has gotten himself engaged to a pretty little thing named Lavinia. She seems pleasant enough, and the fact that she is so smitten with Matthew bodes well. Someone needs to be smitten with Matthew; he’s very smite-worthy. Still, Lavinia has a sinister backstory, which was hinted at via a tense encounter with a new dude Mary has set her sights on.

The new dude, Sir Richard, owns a bunch of tacky tabloid rags that the Crawleys would never deign to read. But he has money. And for that reason alone, Mary’s aunt – the very one who convinced her not to marry Matthew – is pushing hard for a Mary-Sir Richard alliance.

I haven’t yet formed an opinion about Sir Richard. On the one hand, he’s a little handsome. And I like how straightforward he is about why he wants to get hitched to Mary. Together, he says, they would be a power couple the likes of which Britain has never known. Tempting, n’est ce pas?

But on the other hand, there was that tense encounter with Lavinia. I suspect we’ll soon learn that Sir Richard is a colossal creep. Plus, I don’t know how much I’m digging his matchy-matchy suits.

Although Mary confides in Anna (poor Anna! more on her in a moment) that she will indeed accept Sir Richard’s power-proposal, she is awash in mixed feelings. Lo and behold, fickle Mary has decided she made a massive mistake in refusing Matthew, and spends the entire two-hour episode screwing up the courage to tell him she loves him.

But she never quite ekes it out, and off he goes, returning to his bombed-out bunker with some stupid “good luck” stuffed animal she manages to slip him. WTH, exactly, was that? A rat? A rabbit? All I know is, it’s no substitute for telling him she made the biggest mistake of her life in not becoming Mrs. Distant Cousin Matthew. Grrr….

I will conclude this initial recap with what is, to me, the most compelling sub-story of this series: The ill-fated love affair between two servants – Anna and Bates. She is young and beautiful, he chubby and, I think it’s fair to say, un-beautiful. (Ratcheting up the sympathy factor: He limps.) But Bates is the very definition of a stand-up guy, and he has spent decades trying to shed an albatross of a positively gruesome wife.

(Btw, do any of you fellow TV junkies recognize Bates’s evil broad from The Tudors? She was one of Henry VIII’s many starter wives, until he tossed her aside for that hottie Anne Boleyn.)

In Season 1 we learned Bates went to prison for this bitch. And now in Season 2, upon learning Bates has come into a small inheritance because his mom kicked the bucket, the gruesome wife has come back to claim him. She blackmails him into leaving Downton Abbey by saying that if he doesn’t, she will reveal a whopper of a secret about Lady Mary. It’s a doozy, and one that will effectively bring great shame upon the Crawleys-slash-Granthams if the cat slips out of the proverbial bag.

I’ll tell you about the shameful secret in the next recap.

But for now, please join me in saying: Damn you, Mary.

For those of you eagerly anticipating my first-ever Downton Abbey recap, alas, this isn’t it.

Hubby would only let me watch the first hour before he called lights out, and then proceeded to scroll through roughly eight zillion financial websites on his laptop before officially shutting down Hubby + Wifey Central.

Grrr….

Thus, I must watch the second hour tonight. And while I was literally screaming at the telly during the initial 50 minutes – poor Bates and Anna! – I need to get the full lay of the land before I can do the episode proper justice.

In the meantime, I simply must sing Elizabeth McGovern‘s praises from the rafters.

She was always gorgeous; that isn’t even remotely up for debate.

And now she is an equally luminous 50-year-old woman who is giving hope to all of us who aren’t completely convinced that shooting our faces full of Botox and fillers is the best way to sail into our futures.

Granted, I have no idea what McGovern, who plays the warm and charming matriarch Lady Grantham, does of a beauty nature. For all I know, she’s at the dermatologist for injections every other week.

But I doubt it. Because unlike so many actresses, she actually looks her age.

Of course, when she’s in a scene with the crinkly-fabulous Maggie Smith, McGovern looks like a young hottie in comparison. But when she’s with her TV daughters she just looks like a blissed-out, well-dressed mama hen clucking over her unlined chicks. The antithesis, in other words, of a Real Housewife jamming herself into a pair of bedazzled jeans.

Last night, while I was watching McGovern, I wanted to reach through the flatscreen and give her a massive hug for showing us there is indeed another way to go about this aging business. Writing this blog post is the digital version of that thank-you snuggle.

An admitted pop culture fanatic, my tastes swing wildly between high (all things PBS; many things HBO, Showtime and AMC) and low (Jersey Shore).

Hubby, who is my partner in a lot of TV-watching crime – our latest on-demand fave is the heart-thumping Homeland, with Claire Danes and the crazy-good Damian Lewis – would prefer to stay in the upper stratosphere. At least that’s what he says; on many occasions I’ve busted him watching RHOBH over my shoulder.

I guess Beverly Hills is kinda-sorta okay by his lights, because those broads are genuinely cashed-up. It’s the fake cashed-up gals, like the Teresa Giudice-types, that he truly can’t stomach.

Still, for some reason I’ve yet to fathom, I can’t really get my betrothed super-psyched for the costume dramas I so adore. Like Downton Abbey, which I’ve loved from the get-go, and is returning to my telly tomorrow night.

I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and posit that the reason Hubby doesn’t particularly dig a Downton Abbey-esque show is the same reason he never reads the works of my favorite author, Edith Wharton. (I’m sorry, but in my humble opinion, House of Mirth is the best book of all time): On the surface, not much happens of a dynamic nature. A good chunk of the time, it’s just a bunch of old bitties sitting around fancy drawing rooms gossiping and ringing the bell occasionally for the butler to bring in a spot of tea.

But that’s precisely what I love – that endless chatter, that talking-things-to-death business. Oh, and the frocks. The frocks are so key.

To me, it’s fascinating to peek into an era, or eras, in which women had to conduct themselves in an utterly different manner just to survive. And by “survive,” I mean to marry well. Marrying well was everything in those days.

If you didn’t catch Season One of Downton Abbey, which is also very much centered around the marrying-well theme, don’t despair. There were only four episodes. And because I’ve decided to get into the recapping game here on Momover.net, I’ll give you a synopsis of everything that down when I recap Episode One of Season Two.

You can also read tons about it here.

I hope you’ll join me in my telly obsession du jour. Let the costumed drama begin.