As my friend Ellen Rehg of St. Louis put it, “I don’t know how much more I can take! Downton Abbey PTSD!”
The Facebook universe exploded after the final episode in which romantic lead Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) was apparently killed off driving home from the hospital after his wife, Lady Mary Crawley, had just given birth to his son and long-awaited Downton heir. In a recent episode, Lady Sybil Branson (Jessica Brown-Findlay), the youngest of the three daughters in the aristocratic Crawley family, died in childbirth.
Some of my friends swore outright that they wouldn’t continue to watch a series so intent on killing off its main characters (not to mention two of the most appealing ones). “I’d rather the show ended than the death of all the characters,” lamented one friend.
After all, we had been teased and tormented throughout two full seasons before Matthew and his distant cousin, the endearingly acerbic Lady Mary, had finally gotten together. We rooted for their happiness all that time for scant reward — a hasty wedding scene and a few scenes of wedded bliss in a season that otherwise seemed to be galloping from one crisis to the next.
Any fan of the PBS series knows that it’s a melodrama, but we expect it to be exquisitely done, as high-toned as the acting, set and costume design. Serve us tea and crumpets with all that cornball, please.
Matthew’s demise was a sledgehammer blow. As columnist Jace Lacob opined in The Daily Beast, “After a season that was particularly top-heavy with death—the gutting demise of beloved Sybil — and disappointment, Matthew’s death threatens to topple the entire show with its melodramatic weight.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, these were the two actors who didn’t renew their contracts. As Spence Keech of Elyria pointed out, “I felt the orchestration of the last episode was particularly manipulative and tone deaf, and object to creator’s assertion that he simply wrote the only option he had — it’s like he didn’t have the heart to find an alternative.”
Couldn't creator Julian Fellowes have pulled off a "Bewitched" type of switcheroo, with another actor stepping into the role of Matthew? (Dick Sargent took over in the role of Darrin Stephens in the 1960s sitcom). "There would have been other handsome blondes with icy blue eyes to play Matthew," observed my cousin, Ann Ferroni-Strattner. "Now Sybil, that is another story!"
Brian Hannan pronounced himself conflicted: "On one hand, I appreciate the democratic spirit of the show — the wealthy do die, and the poor can find justice. On the other, I wonder if we truly want shows such as Downton Abbey to mine existential questions more than we want a bit of escapist pleasure. I'm fine with people dying or being wrongly imprisoned, because these things happen. I'd just rather they happen to someone other than the main characters we've come to know and who define the program."
Star Trek, Hannan noted, employed the "red shirts" for a reason: "The security crew members we'd never seen before were obviously destined to die – but the artifice allowed the reality of death to visit the show without allowing the specter of death to haunt it."
Not everyone, however, is giving up on the series. Karla Hollencamp, for instance, finds Downton a great way to learn about history: “It is so much fun to see the daughters of American entrepreneurs becoming countesses of faded-glory, landed-gentry families. Downton Abbey is just a great lesson in sociology as well. The birthright of the upper class of England seems pretty meaningless after all the people suffered through WW I. I really like the equal treatment Julian Fellowes gives to the nobility upstairs and the working class downstairs. You see that drama and comedy are part of everyone’s lives.”
Former Montgomery County Commissioner Paula McIlwaine sees the beginning of a feminist subplot: “I want Mary to be the new Matthew and take control of Downton’s future. It would be exciting to have another woman asserting her leadership in the series.”
I find myself too devastated by the death of dashing Matthew to continue watching, I fear. I can break the Downton Abbey addiction that more than one friend has described as “literary crack.”
But what is that date again for the Season 4 premiere?
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