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The British are coming!
English television on American TVs
YOU DON’T HAVE to be an Anglophile to
appreciate British television’s finer efforts. But
watch enough of them and you may become
one. The Connection spoke by phone with
three icons from hit shows that have made the
successful leap across the pond.
Hugh Bonneville
Downton Abbey
THE BRITISH PERIOD drama about an aristocratic family, the Crawleys, and their servants has won numerous awards for its writer,
Julian Fellowes and several members of its cast,
including Hugh Bonneville,
who plays the lord of
the manor, Robert
Crawley, the Earl of
Grantham.
Starting in 1912,
with the sinking of
the Titanic and along
Hugh
Bonneville
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with it one of the heirs to their estate, the
Crawleys—Lord Grantham; his American-
born wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern); their
three daughters, Mary, Edith and Sybil; and
his mother, the Dowager Countess Violet,
played deliciously by Dame Maggie Smith—
grapple with the possibility of losing their
inheritance. Enter a distant cousin and new
heir, Matthew, who while engaging in off-
again, on-again flirtation with Mary, must
learn the ways of the upper class.
Meanwhile drama is happening down-
stairs as well, where the servants combine
attention to duty with their own budding
romances and surreptitious backstabbing.
Bonneville, speaking with The Connection
from his home in Sussex, credits good writing,
high production values and a stellar cast for
part of the series’ success.
“While you think you’re watching an
adaptation of a classic, it’s not, of course,” he
says. “It’s actually got an element of soap about
it. Julian has this tremendous skill in writing
that you want to know what happens next. You
may not like all the characters or every story,
but you want to know what happens.”
Season 2 saw Britain’s entry into the Great
War and Downton Abbey transformed into a
rehabilitation hospital. For his character, “the
First World War [was] deeply unsettling, but
also the fact that the house that he knows and
is the custodian of was sort of ripped from
under him,” Bonneville explains. “And post-
war, as we’re coming into this third season in
1920–21, the lord is still trying to get back onto
his feet, and the same is true of Downton. One
of Robert’s weaknesses is that he tries or he
thinks he can go back to the way it was.”
Bonneville, who has a considerable acting
pedigree in television and films in the U.S. and
the UK, especially appreciates one aspect of life
during the Downton era.
—Anita Thompson
Back then, he notes, “everything was so
much more subtle in terms of communication—the slow burn of romance where a look
or a gesture is the beginning of a story
between two people in drama terms. Now it’s
sort of instant and in your face and You Tubed
and Twittered.
“One of the reasons [Downton Abbey] has
an appeal is that the stories may move quickly,
but the relationships take a lot more time to
unpack themselves, and I think we enjoy
watching that as an audience.”
A THEATER ACTOR, John Nettles found his fame on television. After 10 years as Detective Sergeant Jim Bergerac on Bergerac, he then entertained British TV audiences for 14 years as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby on Midsomer Murders (which airs on the A&E Network in the United States). Barnaby was not an easy sell for Nettles.
