Downton and Prejudice

According to USA Today, nearly 8 million people watched the return of PBS’s Downton Abbey yesterday evening. The miniseries which could fill a daytime soap opera has captured a wide modern audience with the gripping early twentieth century drama. Whether it’s in the 1900s with Downton Abbey or the 1800s with Pride and Prejudice, great British houses, families (with lots of sisters but usually no sons) and courtships continue to hold an incredible fascination for modern audiences.

Perhaps it is nostalgia about simpler, more romantic times. But we are hardly drawn to phenomena such as Downton or P&P because of their simplicity. Much of the attraction seems to lie in the complicated relationships, predicaments and characters.

I watched a film called Midnight in Paris this weekend that dealt with fantasy and romanticization of previous ages. The “pedantic” character Paul (a self-proclaimed expert on practically everything from wine to Monet’s water lilies) diagnoses nostalgia as a type of denial. He explains, “denial of the painful present…the name for this denial is golden age thinking—the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

That does sound rather harsh. But I think the perpetual trend of the period drama feeds a type of escapism. We ignore the lack of plumbing and refrigeration to embrace the romance of a time which is not our own. Hopefully, imagination is not always denial because it sure is fun to be absorbed for a few hours by the complexities of regency England or the sweeping changes of the post WWI era.

As millions continue to watch, another “British Invasion” of sorts will persist.