Downton Abbey: A New Era. The TV series Downton Abbey, which depicted the lives of the lords and ladies of the Crawley family who inhabited the titular estate in the 1910’s and 20’s, lay somewhere between sophisticated drama and super-sized soap. Its slightly dubious celebration of privilege and apparent endorsement of class divisions was made palatable by the quality of
Read moreThe TV series Downtown Abbey, which ran from 2010 to 2015, was a sumptuous soap opera that celebrated and gently critiqued the English aristocracy in its depiction of the well-to-do Crawley family, inhabitants of the titular estate, as they dealt with interpersonal dramas and confronted the tumultuous events and social changes of the early 20th century. Four years after the
Read moreThe Chaperone is a charming but underweight and oddly creaky story of self-discovery and the emergence of a star amid the rapidly changing world of 1920’s America. The chaperone of the title is Norma Carlisle (Downtown Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern) a rather prim and proper woman from Kansas who surprisingly offers to chaperone 15-year-old Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) while she
Read more