Search - Masterpiece Classic: Downton Abbey on DVD

K. K. (GAMER)
Reviewed on 7/31/2022...

Unique in its own way with the plotline of manners and history. A must watch!

0 of 1 member(s) found this review helpful.

William P. from HARDEEVILLE, SC
Reviewed on 7/28/2017...

This is the unedited UK 1st season of the series with some special Features! If you liked the classic Upstairs Downstairs this is a bigger budget version of it with new but similar characters!!!

1 of 1 member(s) found this review helpful.

SV S.
Reviewed on 6/27/2017...

People are overly impressed with this series. I was underwhelmed. Downton Abbey is just a soap opera set during WWI and featuring a mildly "exotic" culture to fascinate middle class Americans who have never travelled or had their hands on a significant amount of money.

The writing is mediocre and the characters are used as pawns for dramatic emotional payoffs, which are the main content of the show. Critical, life-changing moments are brushed aside as if they mean nothing: the cook's eye surgery, a character's death, and so on, are just mechanisms to propel the soap opera foward, and the characters and their inner feelings are ignored. We never find out how the cook feels about her radically improved vision - it is never mentioned again. This laziness in the writing is typical for this show.

A fairly repulsive attitude towards obscene wealth is presented in this show as if it is normal, and is not questioned; the idea that it is right and proper that massive amounts of money should be held by very few people, and that it's "noble" for poor people to take on servile positions of drudgery to benefit their wealthy overlords who oppress them.

Another problem is that the only gay character in the show is the single most repugnant individual depicted. It's not remotely creative, interesting, or inclusive to put homosexual villains in shows, when there are no good gay characters to balance them out. It's just homophobic and hateful.

There are very few likeable or admirable characters in Downton Abbey. Most of them are suffering in an infantile state of moral development and are faintly disgusting in terms of personality. They are selfish and egocentric, devious, duplicitous, ignorant, lacking in empathy, kindness, moral fibre, or any other virtue that would redeem them.

This show is a sweet-flavoured waste of time. 2.5 stars.

1 of 1 member(s) found this review helpful.