I am currently re-watching the olde(er) Upstairs, Downstairs after having seen the 2010 revival (I remember watching a few episodes with my mother when I was very young).
I am at episode 8 right now, and I must say, I am both incredibly shocked and incredibly impressed at the themes the show has used as the centrepoint of its episodes. In the last four alone, we have (are spoilers necessary for a show of this age?)
an affair between the Lady of the house, a cover-up of a rape, an incident of gay behaviour between a staff member and the gentry and the suicide of a maid after an affair
What impresses me is not only how such emotionally-intense topics are adressed, but how they resolve them in what amounts to a period-appropriate manner. I love how the show is willing to really discuss the types of issues that would be scandalous and hard to deal with for an Edwardian household, but especially how they don’t bow to the ‘righteous’ ideas of resolution that a modern sensibility might demand.
Which, I will admit, makes the show very hard for me to watch, but I do appreciate the realism involved.
Any other opinions? Were you shocked at the addressing or the treatment of such topics? Or do you think it is a factor of the production era of the series?
I think a lot of the early episodes weren’t initially shown on American public television…such as WNET channel 13 in New York. Later episodes later referred back to Lady Marjorie jumping into bed with one of her sons’s army friends but the initial episode wasn’t shown.
The later seasons were intact. I remember PBS advertising one episode as “Hazel discovers an old Edwardian custom: wife swapping”.
I saw all the originals in the mid 70s when I was in Buffalo and a Canadian station broadcast them in prime time.
I would think any interesting ‘period’ production would have to have some shocking themes to hold anyone’s interest. Downton Abbey earlier this year had a few eyebrow raisers. Can’t be all tea parties and scaring the horses with that new fangled automobile.
ThirdCultureKid, I recently did the same thing. I was amazed at how well the entire series held up. The only thing a little jarring is that there is almost a complete absence of music during the dialog. We get used these days to having music give us emotional cues, but I guess that wasn’t as true in the early seventies (I was alive, but I just don’t remember that well).
salinqmind, Lark Rise to Candleford has had little in the way of shocking themes, and apparently it’s pretty popular. I somehwat enjoy it, but at the same time find it incredibly lame in the way it imposes 2000’s viewpoints on late nineteenth century people. For example, in one episode a village girl is pregnant and won’t tell who the father is. One of her neighbors, trying to persuade her, says affectionately “There’s no shame here.” Hah!
I like the fact that Upstairs Downstairs was willing to show people behaving in a way true to the time they’re actually supposed to be portraying, even when it makes the character look bad (and yet, somehow providing enough context that you understand their viewpoint). Mr Hudson, the butler, is an exemplar of this. He says some things on occasion that would make a neo-Nazi cringe in shame these days, yet you almost always understand where he’s coming from and sympathize to some extent. Upstairs Downstairs didn’t whitewash its subjects.
I burst into laughter while watching that episode where Georgina was throwing a party and hired Black musicians causing Huson & Mrs Bridges to huddle together in fear.
