It’s more popular than religion, it clogs up Facebook every
Sunday night, and it’s an out-of-the-park homer for PBS. I know—what’s not to love about Downton Abbey? But there’s more to this show than scheming footmen,
Maggie Smith’s one-liners, and “Bates is hot.” For writers, the show is a special
pleasure because it hits on so many issues that authors grapple with all the
time.
1) It’s a lesson in potboiler
writing.
Like many bestselling authors, Downton creator Julian Fellowes keeps viewers engaged by employing two
simple strategies that any fiction writer can use: delayed
gratification and sudden setbacks.
Delayed
gratification sometimes plays out over entire seasons, with a desired
result—Bates being cleared of the murder charge, or Matthew warming up to Mary—getting
pushed farther and farther away as the complications mount and hopes are
dashed. But Fellowes also uses this trick in miniature, teasing delayed
gratification out of the smaller moments. Remember when Mary was trying to figure
out whether someone in the house had mailed a crucial letter that would save the
estate from ruin? She went to the servants’ dining room to ask the staff if
anyone posted the letter, and no one had. She turned away, deflated, and the
viewer’s hopes were thwarted too—what would happen to Downton now? But then
Daisy, the kitchen maid, came into the room and asked what was going on—and it
turned out she posted the letter, and
all was saved. OK, it was manipulative, but notice that Fellowes didn’t give us an easy win even in this
small scene; a delay of a minute or two stretches out the drama that much more and keeps
us watching.*
Then
there’s the other side of the coin: While he’s delaying our gratification, Fellowes
litters the show with unexpected setbacks and tragedies. Brides are jilted; people
get sick and die. And while that kind of continual jarring would make most of
us crazy in real life, in a story, it’s a surprise—and fun, in a roller-coaster
sort of way**. It makes us wonder what’s around the next corner, and the next,
and we keep watching to see what disaster will happen this time. So while
Fellowes pulls us along on the rope of delayed gratification, he smacks us silly
with sudden tragedy. And we like it, because it’s good storytelling.
2) It’s bubbliciously
soapy.
Most Downton fans
will guiltily admit that part of its attraction is that it’s a big soap
opera—a serial about love and betrayal among a large cast of characters. So were
Dallas and Dynasty (a friend used to call them Dallasty); so were ER and NYPD Blue and even the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, in its way—and so are
countless successful shows on the air now. There’s a reason why TV writers
draw from that well again and again: The serial structure hooks viewers, and the
machinations keep them watching. Fellowes
has avoided some old soap clichés—so far, we haven’t had any babies switched at
birth or lovers who turn out to be siblings, though this season I smell a
dead-person-who’s-not-really-dead (the heir in India?). But he has trotted out
a few chestnuts like amnesia (the soldier with the burned face), villains who
do evil just because they’re spiteful (Thomas and O’Brien), ill-starred lovers
who have to overcome outlandishly complicated obstacles (Mary and Matthew), and
the old standby of rich people who keep their cognac in glass decanters and are
constantly in danger of “losing everything” and being forced to flee to their
spare mansion, the little one with only 10 bedrooms.
3) Julian Fellowes is a
late bloomer.
I have a soft spot in my heart for Julian Fellowes. I first
noticed him when he was an actor on the BBC series Monarch of the Glen in the early 2000s. He played Kilwillie, the
mischievous blueblood neighbor, and got stuck doing a lot of slapstick scenes.
But he always played that character with zeal and a deliciously snooty accent.
And it turned out that at the same time, he was quietly nurturing his career as
a writer, penning the screenplay for Gosford
Park that later won him an Oscar. He also wrote two bestselling novels. And
his dual careers of acting and writing really took wing when he was in his 50s—older than I am now. I love that.
4) It ain’t Big Rich England.
These days, we’re plagued with a bevy of “big rich” reality
shows—I call them “fat-lip shows”—like Big
Rich Texas and The Real Housewives of
This City That Will Not Surprise You by Having Rich Housewives in It. These
shows take us inside the mahogany walls of America’s zillionaires and show us
that 1) they rarely work, 2) they bicker constantly, 3) they fuss a lot about
their appearance, and 4) they take a long time to eat dinner. Of course, Downton Abbey is like that too, but it’s all
concocted by a writer***, which somehow makes it more palatable. And, hallelujah,
it gives that writer a really good job.
* The creators of the sci-fi show Eureka had a similar storytelling trick that they called “the big
button”: The heroes slave away through the whole show on a machine that will stop
some looming disaster, and in the last act, just as all hell is breaking loose,
they finish the machine and push the magic button—and nothing happens. Or
something happens that appears to save the world, but that causes another
disaster, and they have to solve that.
By the end, the viewer is spent and satisfied from all the tension and release
(and that connection between storytelling and sex, folks, is a whole other
topic).
** I can’t imagine that it’s healthy to desensitize ourselves
to tragedy like this all the time. It might explain in part why we’re willing
to go to war and don’t step in to stop human rights violations. We accuse kids
of being desensitized to violence through video games, but anyone who consumes
popular entertainment—perhaps even novels—is in the same boat. Or is it good to
have thick skins? Would we all die of fear if we weren’t toughened up by tales
of little kids being cooked by witches and eaten by wolves?
*** Reality shows do employ writers, at least to edit the
footage and make the “stories” hang together better for viewers. And writers
for some of the game-show types, like Survivor
and The Great Race, basically
contrive the whole show. (Great article here on
the inside scoop by a reality-show writer.) One show, Storage Wars, recently suffered a scandal when former star Dave
Hester accused the producers of planting valuable items in the storage lockers
to give an edge to some competitors and make the stories more compelling. I
must come out here and admit that, scandal or no, I love Storage Wars—it’s one of my favorite guilty pleasures, and I’m
squarely on Team Brandi. I was also a big fan of the tragic-in-retrospect Anna Nicole. One critic summed up my
feelings about that show: “Why doesn’t somebody put down the camera and help her?”