Downton Abbey - ITV1

I actually quite liked it. Was pretty good for a period drama. Great to see Elizabeth McGovern again as well. This was certainly better than previous recent ITV dramas(Identity, Bouquet of Barbed Wire, U Be Dead). However new decent drama is very rare nowadays(apart from The Fixer which they stupidly axed).
 
Wasn't the date Thursday May 29th on the poster advertising the fair ! Time Stamp 00.40s

00.43 s "When does it open ?", "Tomorrow Afternoon" Mr. Bates replies

Therefore Ep 3. if the date is correct begins on Wednesday May 28th and judging by the "in mourning until September" remark then by default it could well be 1913 as in 1913 May 29th was a Thursday but yet they discussed the death of the Turk as if it were the following day / week / month etc.
 
I'll in for the rest of the series based on the opening episode. I thought it was really good.

The best thing was the look and production of the whole thing. The house and it
 
Well, it was good - but not the humdinger of an opening episode that I thought we'd get.

There was some good stuff - but the big flaw for me was the endless whittering about 'the entail', inheritances and the law of the time: dry and confusing, and a barrier to engaging with the characters. Indeed, it felt odd to put the future of the estate at risk in the very first episode when we, as viewers, don't have anything invested in it. Add to that references to a number of characters we've never even seen and it all gets a bit difficult to get involved.

Thank goodness, therefore, for some well-drawn characters, even if some are a little familiar ... ;) However, greater focus and clarity to the plot would have helped massively. I can't help wondering if the 90-minute pilot was a hindrance rather than a help ...

As for the ratings, I'm sure it will have opened well but I'd wager some folk will have glazed over as the inheritance complexities rattled on. Coming off the back of The X Factor and with no competition on BBC One, I'd be surprised if it landed much less than 8 million ... however, if it's up against David Tennant in Single Father in a couple of weeks, it'll have to up its game if it wants to maintain that audience.
 
Yes that was my feeling too - whilst the males are favoured, there is also a favour to a direct line even if it skips a generation.

And surely, if that were so, how did QV succeed to the throne ? There must have been a male cousin somewhere along the line who would have succeeded in her place.

And it wouldn't matter if a potential granRABon came along far into the future - as long as he was born before the death of the present incumbent.

Edit

Just having read the previous post by RoyalMile - I can see now.

The "entail" was basically a Will - and so does not necessarily follow standard / legal inheritance convention.
 
Anyone who wants to check on the use of worRAB in formal contexts in the past can consult the Times Archive which goes from 1785 to 1985. Although you have to pay to see the full context of the worRAB you can visit the site for free http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/archive/ and put in a search term. If you then sort the results in order with the oldest first you can see when a word was first used in the newspaper.

According the search I have just done "boyfriend" first appeared in The Times in 1933, from the context it was presumably the name of a racehorse, but it did not appear in those august pages again until 1955. I know that The Times used a more formal English than would be experienced in the everyday conversation below stairs, but this does suggest to me that it is unlikely that servants would have used the word "boyfriend" in 1912.

While I see no point in looking for errors in Downton I do think that Julian Fellowes could have been a bit more careful in choosing worRAB that were more appropriate to the period.
 
I think you might be right. He could have used the stuff that the young maid almost sent to the dinner table by mistake in the first episode. They don't normally use that kind of plot device and then forget about it.
 
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