Lots of DA swag here: http://www.signals.com/cgi-bin/hazel.cgi?action=CATEGORY&PATH=14AA;14BQ&PAGING=144
A little more on Clooney’s appearance here, incl. a very brief clip: See George Clooney on the Set of Downton Abbey Alongside Hugh Bonneville's Robert Crawley (PHOTO)
Did anyone see the PBS DA special last week, hosted by Bernadette Peters? Yikes. She seemed both drunk and Botoxed to the gills. Some nice tidbits on S5, though.
I dunno about drunk; she was reading the copy straight off the teleprompter with no expression or engagement. And that skin-tight red dress wasn’t her best look.
But, yeah, good ratio of Season Five clips to previous seasons material and lots of cast interviews.
Martha Stewart’s got a staff probably bigger than the Crawleys do, and they came up with a very impressive “Gingerbread Abbey.” The actress who plays Mrs. Patmore was there to enjoy it: http://greatideas.people.com/2014/12/18/martha-stewart-lesley-nicol-gingerbread-downton-abbey/
The NYT has an interesting timeline showing the episodes of DA put in context with the British and world history of the day: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/31/arts/television/12312015_DowntonAbbey-timeline.html?emc=eta1#/#time357_10561
The U.S. premiere is tomorrow night; check local listings.
Watching the rerun of S4 finale, I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed before that Tom Branson is played by the same actor who was Marcus Agrippa in Rome.
Well, there was lot going on in the first episode. I’ll have to watch it again because I probably missed something.
I liked Baxter’s confession to Cora, and Cora subsequently dressing down Mr. Barrow. But then he almost immediately gets out of the doghouse because of the fire. Too bad–I’d like to have seen him on the defensive for a while.
Moseley never fails to make me laugh. And Violet had some very funny lines, as usual.
So Edith is going to adopt her own child, yes?
Have we seen this Lady Chrysanthemum (or whatever) before? The one that was fooling around with James? I don’t remember her.
I think that school teacher is going to give Robert a heart attack.
By the way, the actress who plays Rose is starring in the upcoming live-action Cinderella movie (directed by Kenneth Branagh). And the actress who plays Daisy will be one of her wicked stepsisters.
trailer: YouTube
Yeah, the writers like toying with us! Of course, he’s just the kind of person who actually would have been snooping around upstairs, so it’s not out of character to have him be the one who noticed the fire.
Nothing to add, I’m just subscribing so I get notice when the “Downton Abbey on Facebook” is updated. 
The teacher’s behavior at dinner struck me as historically inaccurate. Of course, there were clearly people in the 1910s-20s with such views, and even more radical. However, I doubt one would be hired as a primary schoolteacher, especially in a rural-ish school as in Downton, unless she developed an ability to keep her more controversial opinions to herself except with closest friends. And she would know – or at least believe without a doubt 
– that an aristocratic family would be even more conservative and unlikely to be amused by such views than a middle-class small-town school board. :smack:
Plus opposing a war memorial was an odd “hill to choose to die on” at dinner considering, again, that lower- and middle-class people fought and died in the war and most would have wanted to memorialize the war dead even if they personally felt the war was pointless. :smack: Her stance would have angered a group of farmers or factory workers almost as much as it angered many at the Downton dinner table. If she had stuck to arguing about the Labor PM (as others in the episode did), Julian Fellowes would still have shown her to be liberal and outspoken without making her into a tone-deaf asshole. :mad:
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I liked Baxter’s confession to Cora, and Cora subsequently dressing down Mr. Barrow. But then he almost immediately gets out of the doghouse because of the fire. Too bad–I’d like to have seen him on the defensive for a while.
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Fellowes has more than once pulled Barrow’s fat out of the fire by having him do something unquestionably useful right after getting himself into an apparently inescapable doghouse. (Hopefully, he does the same for James in the next episode. 
) I surprise myself by having to say that utter-weasel Barrow doesn’t lack physical courage.
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Have we seen this Lady Chrysanthemum (or whatever) before? The one that was fooling around with James? I don’t remember her.
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No, we’ve never seen Lady Anstruther before, but James has mentioned her frequently since his first appearance in the show. The way he described her, I expected a contemporary of the Dowager Countess utterly delusional to think herself attractive to a young man. Upon seeing her, clearly not. 
Agreed that the teacher’s behavior was completely inaccurate. Someone worldly enough to know that she shouldn’t accept an invitation that wasn’t from Cora directly would also be socially aware enough not to raise those issues at a dinner where she was a guest. The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that she was the initiator – it would have played better to me if the other guests had steered the conversation to the point where she had to respond truthfully (and that also would have made Isobel’s comments about standing up for one’s beliefs seem more genuine). I’ve ended up really disliking this character, and I think the show believes the audience will find her sympathetic.
I also wish Barrow would have had to sweat a little more about his place in the household. And even though the Crawleys are grateful to him … I think that once the smoke clears (HA), they would be asking “but what WAS he doing upstairs in the middle of the night?”
I thought they did a great job showing how awkward and weird Lady Edith’s visit with the farm family and her/their daughter was.
And with all the attention Marry is giving Tony, I think we can bet that she ISN’T going to marry him. I wish they would really throw us a curve ball and have her marry:
Tom. That keeps all the grandkids where they belong and sets us up for some interesting pillow talk!
Well, the Crawleys know that James was boinking Lady Anstruther; so for Barrow to admit that he was pimping/look-out would just be a misdemeanor (relatively).
Yep. I mean who just jumps in and starts throwing around political bombs around the dinner table when you are a guest? It really requires some sort of socially inept person to offer those opinions unbidden - you make a good point that it should have come up as someone asking her what she thinks as a “common person” (they’ve done that on the show before, haven’t they?). I’d imagine that even if Tom sympathizes with the viewpoint behind it, he’d find the manners abhorrent.
I opened up the UK thread figuring I’d read what people had to say about the first episode there, and I wanted to warn the spoiler-averse NOT to do this. I almost immediately saw people referring to things that didn’t happen in the US version of the season premier. I assume this was due to the difference in editing between the US and UK versions, although it may have been that some people were talking about multiple episodes in one post.
As soon as Cora finished telling him off, I was wondering how long it would be before Thomas managed to find a convenient way to make himself seem worth keeping around. I wasn’t sure it would be in this episode, but I figured it wouldn’t be later than next week.
Well, deliberately getting himself shot during WWI must have taken physical courage as well, albeit courage of a weaselly kind. Braving physical danger for the benefit of someone else was a change, though.
Yep, the only other time I recall him doing that was when he intervened in James’s mugging and got beat up instead. Considering the crush he had (has?) on James, that could be chalked up to a further effort to get into James’s pants.
It seems every season he gets a bit of the old redemption arc but then goes back to being a viper. Like stealing the dog but then staying out all night finding her when he thought she was really lost. Or the time he turned out to be right about the nanny being evil. Or the Jimmy incident. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think he’s topped himself with the fire, though!
So I was the only one who thought “Wait, why am I watching this show?”?