Downton Abbey Needs Another War

A mudfight's the major conflict on Downton Abbey now.

Creator, producer, and writer of the phenomenally successful BBC television program "Downton Abbey" — Julian Fellowes — may say he doesn't want to take the series all the way through the next World War, but the show might benefit from his considering how using World War I as a backdrop helped make it such a success.

Any successful writing project benefits from a unifying theme, or a "spine" (as some people choose to call it). Failing this, a good backdrop always helps, and there has been no better one to use down through the history of good writing than war. War focuses the mind — and nation — as nothing else can. It works particularly well as a backdrop to a love story--the contrast being too delicious to escape.

World War I gave the show a place to send male characters, where they would become heroes in uniform (you gals love it). It gave a reason for converting the aristocratic manor that serves as the unifying local for the show to a rehabilitation center for returning officers. It gave a spurned female character a place to go to feel useful. Post war theatrics included a failed attempt to launch a contraband retail operation, establishing a soup kitchen for hungry vets, an out-of-wedlock child with a housemaid.

The lord of the manor could strut around in an army uniform, doing his part on the homefront. A servant soldier could heroically make another servant his deathbed war bride, so she could look forward to a pension when old. How tear-jerking is that? Not to mention the chance for the romantic lead to have a miraculous recovery from a battlefield spinal injury.

The show lacks a unifying theme, or anything else that ties the multivarious pitter patter of slap-dash storylines together, some of which just spring up randomly. Lord Grantham and Thomas heading to America is almost as out-of-the-blue as Gregson disappearing in Germany. Couldn't they have gone off in search for him? Will his going missing end up having something to do with espionage or rising Nazism?

Ah, but now we're back to war again.