Why Downton is Failing

Allen Leech plays Tom Branson

I’m Julian Fellows and I have this idea of essentially doing Upstairs Downstairs (a class drama with the focus on the Downstairs people) as a super rich costume drama about a manor home (this time, more focused on the Upstairs people).

I pitch it to the BBC and they say, “Great, but make the Countess of Grantham an American to seduce the American audience.” And then I write and write and write, showing drafts to my producers and tweaking to please. Then it airs and we party. Then success delivers the really hard part.

The enormous success of the show created the inevitable: a demand for another season or seasons, and suddenly after having years to write the first season, I have months to craft a second series and then a third and now a fourth.

It is still better and richer than anything else on television but the problems are becoming harder to ignore. The debut episode this past Sunday was a disappointment in several ways:

•  What was the point of the story line about the Nanny? It was unnecessary and contributed nothing to our understanding of the times or another character.
• Mary was badly written and directed in her grief. She was written as a cartoon and the worst part was her line to her son” “Poor little orphan.”
• And poor Barrow… Mr. Fellows has abandoned a character that had become complex and interesting and reverted to making him a caricature of evil.
•  And poor Lady Crawley… She has been treated like Barrow. She has become the character who cares for those whom others will not care for. She is the Upstairs version of Mrs. Hughes who does the same thing. They are identical characters of differing means.
• The return of Edna Braithwaite is a forced plot point. I do not believe that this character could or would be re-engaged by the family after being fired—especially for inappropriate behavior with Branson. The return of this character is an unfair challenge to viewers who cannot remember or did not see her first scenes in the show.
• The forced love quadrangle of Daisy & james etc. is uninteresting and confusing.
• And finally, Fellows has not had Tom Branson become gay, time travel to Vancouver and meet me.