This article is a preview from the Winter 2019 edition of New Humanist
When I first saw the trailer for the recent Downton Abbey film, I couldn’t help letting out a small snort of derision. Intercut with gorgeous panning shots of stately homes at sunrise, diligent underbutlers polishing silver, and intricately beaded frocks is the film’s big pitch to viewers, the text carefully crafted to intrigue us enough that we’ll join the queue at the box office on release day. “They live like royalty,” it begins, and then follows up a few seconds later with the kicker: “But are they ready for the real thing?”
If good drama is to be found in unresolved tension and the distance characters must travel between what they are now and what they want to be, then this is not it. The family at the heart of Downton Abbey – an ITV period drama set in the 1920s which ran on television from 2010 to 2015 to global acclaim and millions of viewers – is aristocratic and extremely wealthy. That the major plot impetus for this film comes from the fact that some slightly richer and posher people are coming to visit for a couple of days, necessitating a spring-clean and a few extra staff, hardly fills one with anticipation.
Yet despite its vacuous content and insistence on reintroducing every single character from the original TV show no matter how irrelevant they are to the plot, the film received some reasonable reviews and heavyweight surrounding commercial deals – even Google signed up to do a related ad spot. Peter Travers in Rolling Stone wrote that “For a few fleeting moments, they’ve returned us to a time of bygone glamour when class trumped crass and even treachery was sweetly done.” More than ever, it seems that there are different rules for big-budget period dramas. Set something in the past and spend a lot of money on the costumes, and critics will overlook a multitude of sins that they would never miss in a contemporary-set drama.
So why is it that period dramas like Downton Abbey are so incredibly popular with viewers and so sought after by broadcasters and studios chasing fragmented audiences in the age of streaming? Setting films and TV shows in the past isn’t a new phenomenon by any means – Gone with the Wind, released in 1939 and set in 1861 against the backdrop of the American Civil War, is still one of the most decorated and highest grossing films of all time. Throughout the 20th century, works based on historical events or literary adaptations were made to varying success. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that these became the kind of box-office-smashing pop-cultural moments that we recognise today.
The 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written by Andrew Davies and starring an infamously wet-shirt-clad Colin Firth, enthralled the British viewing public and was rapidly exported to the US and elsewhere to similar success. It was followed a rash of period dramas such as the 1996 film version of Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow and TV serials like 1999’s Wives and Daughters. And the flood of corsets and carriages has not dried up yet, with a constant flow of costume dramas appearing on our screens ever since.
The common thread that runs through many of these popular period dramas is their portrayal of poshness and extreme privilege. It’s relatively unusual for a film or TV show set in the past to concern itself with the plight of the poor. Mostly they portray the very upper echelons of society: characters with a lot of money, or titles, or both. The Crown, the big-budget series produced by Peter Morgan for Netflix about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, begins its third series in November and embodies many of the classic characteristics from the genre – royalty is a popular subject, what with Queen Victoria having had her own series on ITV just a few years before.
All of these shows focus much more on the aesthetics of this elevated status than anything else. The costumes, the locations, the lavish sets, the swelling cinematic music – all of these elements come together to show a kind of alternative-universe version of the past, where the harshest edges of inherited power and wealth are softened until we can sink gently into the comforting, beautiful whirl of colours on the screen.
The Crown, in particular, has mastered this balance between fantasy and reality. Many of the events portrayed do have real-life counterparts, which lend the series prestige and a certain sense of gravitas, but events are manipulated or omitted in order to shield the viewer from uncomfortable or unhelpful truths. As an interesting sidenote, I’ve observed that publications covering pop culture have exploited this gap very profitably with explainer articles about things like the Suez Crisis or Princess Margaret’s unhappy marriage, so that when curious viewers search for terms from a Crown episode, their site is primed to scoop up that traffic.
It’s just easier to consider the sanitised antics of the extremely wealthy to be entertainment when they’re viewed with the long lens of hindsight. Free from the guilt or intellectual engagement that a contemporary drama about the super-rich would provoke, we can enjoy the minuscule plot developments of Downton Abbey or the “based on a true story” machinations of The Crown. This fetishised, fictional version of Britishness is also beloved around the world, a kind of gift-shop version of our unpleasant history. It’s no accident that acclaimed performers like Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Olivia Coleman tend to start winning awards in America only when they play a British queen on screen.
Even Peaky Blinders, a highly successful BBC drama about a gangster family in Birmingham in the aftermath of the First World War, doesn’t stay focused on their petty race-fixing antics for long. Subsequent series see the Shelby family rise far above their original station as they make more money. They move to London, their clothes get nicer, and they start hobnobbing with Russian nobility. Class escapism is the ultimate escapism, since the aristocratic trappings of bygone eras are so unattainable that we might as well be watching science fiction, albeit of a kind with a pleasantly recognisable basis.
The constant appearance of yet more period dramas does do harm, though. The disproportionate focus on the extreme wealth of the past means there are more well-paid parts on TV for white actors who can ride a horse and talk like Prince Charles. For over a decade now, black British directors and actors have found more roles and opportunities in America than at home – Steve McQueen, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor and David Oyelowo are just a few of the big names who got their big break across the pond. Oyelowo told the Guardian in 2013 that he couldn’t find backing for any of his projects at home, with investors telling him: “We’re looking for Dickens or Austen. Your story is a hard sell.”
This is the uncomfortable truth of today’s obsession with period drama: the past it portrays is not often not compatible with tenets we today consider fundamental, like equality and diversity. For all that writers like Julian Fellowes might bend the truth and find space at Downton Abbey for an openly gay butler who seems to lead a happy life, there’s no getting away from the fact that they provide a narrow, conservative version of the world that, if it appeared in a contemporary drama, would be unpacked by woke viewers in long, outraged threads on social media.
Putting the past on our screens in this digestible way is a huge and profitable industry, only growing larger from year to year. The frocks in a good, posh period drama are gorgeous, there’s no denying that. But we still have to reckon with what it says about us that we enjoy it so much.
