celebrity gossip, academic style

Note: Using mildly nefarious means, I am currently watching Season 2, which will air stateside in a few months. But there are no real spoilers concerning Season 2, save its setting (we are now in World War I, that’s no secret) and the use of a curling iron.

For the last four years, I have been surrounded by media studies academics. In other words, people whose job it is to consume media. Name a television show, a movie, a popular internet site, or a video game, and chances are that 2 out of the 3 people with whom you were speaking had not only viewed that piece of media, but developed a theory of varying levels of complexity to explain it/its popularity/its failure/its aesthetics/its influence on other forms of media, you get the picture.

But when you start work at a new school, one where you are the only media studies scholar in a sea of academics, things change. I first experienced this when I taught at Whitman, and I’m experiencing it again at my new job here at Putney. I don’t mean to imply that my colleagues are uncultured — far from it. More that they aren’t hyper-media-cultured the way that my job (and passions) have required me to be.

Which is all a long way of saying that I’ve had a hard time having conversations about my favorite television shows in real life. I KNOW, LIFE IS SO HARD. You don’t watch The Good Wife, math teacher! You don’t watch Misfits, biology teacher! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? (Unlike Whitman, where television still remains a bit of a dirty word, I will say that Putney’s faculty is well-versed in television that has made its way to DVD: when you live on a farm in the middle of Vermont, TV-on-DVD is the way to go. Friday Night Lights, The Wire, and Freaks and Geeks are all very, very popular). But you know what everyone has watched? Science and math teachers, English teachers, history teachers and librarians and administrators?

DOWNTON ABBEY! And this isn’t some weird New England thing — everyone loves it! Moms and cousins and bosses and students and 13-year-olds, they all love some Downton! (Okay, maybe boys don’t love the Downton as much, but I’d love to hear from those who do). And you know who else loves Downton? Actual British People! As in the show averaged 10 million viewers per viewing….and then 6 million additional viewers when it was rebroadcast on PBS in America. PBS! You guys, when was the last time that 6 million people watched PBS and it wasn’t for a Ken Burns documentary? This is a huge deal. Plus Downton beat Mildred Pierce for the “Best Mini-Series” Emmy, and everyone knows how hard it is to defeat the combo of HBO, mini-series, Kate Winslet, and period piece.

In short: Downton is popular. It has a broad appeal. I was about to assert that it has done so without any of the repugnance that attends other broadly popular shows, such as that good ol’ populist punching bag Two and a Half Men. But the appeal of Downton, like so much broadly popular television, from Two and a Half Men to CSI, stems from two sources. The first is self-evident: Downton has high production values, its well-written, the dresses are obviously fabulous, and the performances are good.

The second should be obvious, but it gets hidden: Downton is genre television. It’s a straight up costume/class drama in the way that Two and a Half Men is a straight up laugh-track sitcom, and CSI: Your Town is a straight up procedural. Sure, Downton is about the slow disintegration of the landed gentry in England, and thus a story about the end of the class/costume drama, but it’s still an “upstairs/downstairs” costume drama of the first degree.

Which isn’t to say it’s bad. Indeed, that’s part of why you probably started watching — because you know what to expect. Costume drama! From Britain! Stuff about servants AND about fabulously wealthy people?! COUNT ME IN!

Because that’s the magic of genre: you don’t need to know the specifics. You know that you like the basics, and that whatever builds upon those basics will satisfy you in some way. That’s why you go see a rom-com on Valentine’s Day, or watch something with the word ‘vampire’ in it, or go see films that open on weekends in July: they’re all genre films. Katherine Heigl is now a genre unto herself; so is The Rock. “Genre” doesn’t mean that the film is necessarily bad; it just means that it sells itself on the promise of a specific set of pleasures.

In other words: you know what you’re going to get when you see something advertised as a costume drama. That’s why people were so pissed with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: it had all the accotruements of a costume drama, but what’s with this punk music?! And whimsical meditations on the way that the grass sways? Coppola betrayed genre expectations, and thus betrayed a solid chunk of her audience.

With that said, the best genre fare doesn’t stick strictly to the recipe. (Which is why I actually really love Marie Antoinette, but that’s another conversation). The Sopranos was a gangster show, but it was a gangster show with its protagonist in therapy. Downton is a costume and class drama, but one that deals with the disintegration of the very division of wealth and social mores that sustained the clearly delineated British class system. It’s a genre show about the end of the genre, if that makes sense.

And that’s also what makes it interesting, because it means that Downton has an American head-of-house, anxiety over the future of the household, maids going to typing school, women having sex with Turkish ambassadors, and [SEASON TWO SPOILER ALERT!] sisters doing low-class work, like NURSING and FARMING. The horror! Or actually, the non-horror! The subtle anxiety and excitement! Because that’s how actual change occurs — not with huge declarations of LIFE IS CHANGING! OUR WAY OF LIFE IS OVER! but through subtle actions and reactions that accumulate into change. [At times Maggie Smith's character can veer dangerously into the "huge declarations of change" territory: I am the Dowager Countess of Grantham, I am aghast at all modern things! WHAT IS A WEEK-END! But the writers cloak her character as comic relief -- as almost a satire of herself -- which, along with Maggie Smith's performance style, is the reason she comes off a woman, once strong and powerful, whose grandchildren merely humor her....an almost tragi-comic reminder of an era now gone, an era revealed as slightly absurd.]

There are other obvious ways that Downton subverts genre expectations: the footman is gay (people were gay before 1960! In Britain!); the driver is an Irish rebel with a penchant for Marxist literature. But what interests me most — what continually pushes Downton‘s plot to clash with the expectations of the costume/class drama — are the recurrent pressures and pleasures of modernity. How does the telephone change the way that the household runs? How does the car change where, and with whom, one can ride? Even the steam engine changed the facility with which members of the household, both “up” and “down” stairs, could go to London. How does shellshock — a phenomenon of modern war — affect returning soldiers and their places within the home? How does the spread of the press, and the self-made men it made rich, affect who someone of Mary Crawley’s status could marry? HOW DID A CURLING IRON CHANGE THE WAY MARY CRAWLEY COULD DO HER HAIR? (I’m not kidding; this is a real question). Modernity, you change everything! But in such subtle, fascinating ways.

Like so many others, Math and Science teachers and cousins and Mothers and teenagers, I came to Downton Abbey for its genre. But I stayed for the way the show — and its grappling with modernity — contorts it. And, okay, fine, the dresses.