Upstairs, Downstairs, and in My Lady's Chamber

I haven’t had a television crush since ‘Lost’, the ABC series, ended. First came a period of mourning, like the gaping hole left in turning the last page of a gripping book. Then came the interlopers, friends suggesting all sorts of shows I held at arm’s length, especially Glee, to which I am strangely, and gratefully, impervious. No, I needed a new sort of obsession, one where I’d be on the edge of my seat with anticipation waiting for the next week’s installment.

There was a point in pre-child life where we briefly became hooked on “24”, a full season in arrears. But back then we had the luxury of cramming in three episodes a night slouched on the sofa without a single interruption from adverts flogging Cialis and Pajama Jeans (was this really smart marketing for the show’s target demographic?), or Small Children appearing at the bottom of the stairs. Television barely gets a look in these days. All the more amusing since my husband made the installation of a flat-screen priority number one in our house move. Still, since AppleTV sends photos from our computer floating across the television screen, it makes for excellent wall art. Even when a frequently recurring image is my friend’s father in his Speedos.

‘Downton Abbey’, the BAFTA- and Emmy-award winning British period drama television series (there’s no acronym for that), has just wrapped after two wildly successful seasons in the UK. Everyone has been talking about it; even New York magazine devoted a few column inches to some of Lady Grantham’s acid-tipped zingers earlier this year. My own parents wouldn’t take my call when they were settling in for the much-anticipated season finale. And the show entered the Guinness Book of Records as “the most critically acclaimed television show”, with 11 Emmy nominations, beating out Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and Modern Family. What sort of period drama has that kind of power, I wondered. Two minutes into Episode 1, Season 1, I had my answer. I was chomping at the bit like a goat at a salt lick. A bad Downton Abbey habit had formed.

Apparently, US offerings of British programmes, especially those served up on PBS Masterpiece Theatre, shake the molecular cells of Brits and Americans alike. With all the stately homes that function as impossibly glamorous backdrops, it seems to be a genre of programming Brits do rather well. Brideshead Revisited and House of Eliott both made the move to Masterpiece Theatre and I have been cornered more than once at social events by fierce PBS aficionados keen to discuss the 2011 re-run of Upstairs, Downstairs. Long before the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, hottie Sean Bean was steaming things up in the 90’s with BBC adaptations of Clarissa and Lady Chatterley. And the Special Relationship was cemented with the British-American whodunit movie, Gosford Park, a huge box office hit on both sides of the pond. In short, the tristes, intrigues and dirty secrets between the sheets and lives of the aristocracy and those in domestic service, continues to tickle our collective fancy.

While I’m soaking up every line of Downton Abbey, my husband has fallen for yet another zombie series, ‘The Walking Dead’. Zombies rear their lolling heads and shuffling feet every few years but this series has managed to hook great swathes of our friends, even those who had hitherto succumbed to the peppy antics of Glee. (Perhaps they were now suitable fodder for the brain-eating zombies in the former.) Besides an obvious revulsion, it seems a no-brainer to pass up the noisy gorging of the undead for gorgeous scenery, glamorous dresses and sanguine scandal to boot.

With only fifteen episodes to the entire series, a twice-weekly habit will take me through the Christmas season. And when the last episode ends, I won’t have to wilt on a chaise longue or wait to be revived with smelling salts. No, word is there will be a ‘Downton Abbey Christmas Special’ that should tide me over to the New Year. After that, it’s any man’s guess whether 2012 will bring with it any new guilty pleasures. But I can guarantee it won’t be Glee. Or Zombies.