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Critic Reviews
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Downton Abbey remains an extremely reliable television show. The appeal of the series is its pastness, its portrait of a completely foreign culture from a land before time.
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The British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it's a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne.
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Despite all the repetition and longueurs, this Downton Abbey frequently works, as the first one did, as a peppery little trifle.
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Appropriate to the pace and the space of series television, it welcomes you into its intrigues at a walking pace.
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Series creator and writer Julian Fellowes has a habit of using dialogue to telegraph the obvious.
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The series seamlessly moves between the horrors of war and the gentility of life in the show's titular 100-room manor.
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Writer/series creator Julian Fellowes weaves together an engrossing tapestry of stories, although some of them stretch credulity or peter out.
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The characters are so beautifully and thoroughly rendered that we, as viewers, are caught up in their lives.
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Rarely do they strain the credulity of real situations or the constraints of the time.
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It is big, beautiful, beautifully acted and romantic, its passions expressed with that particular British reserve that serves only to make them burn brighter.
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The second series, as they call it in Britain, shows signs of strain, as creator Julian Fellowes throws one obstacle after another between his sets of star-crossed lovers (some upstairs, some down).
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Season 2 is in many ways as captivating and addictive as the first, but this time around, the series comes off as a shameless throwback to itself.
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If Downton's staging and dialogue can be too on-the-nose, the characters are still drawn with great subtlety.
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For those of us who hungered for a year to witness these new chapters, the appetite is insatiable.
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The vibrant brew of upstairs-downstairs relationships is more savory now, the characters more complicated.
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Downton Abbey lacks surprise and is stretched precariously thin, a house full of fascinating people with not nearly enough to do, all caught in a loop of weak storylines that circle round but never fully propel.
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The emotional authenticity of Downton Abbey continues to make it a classic.
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There's nothing in Downton you won't recognize, and almost nothing you won't enjoy.
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The ideas behind most of these developments are fine, but they get thrown at the viewer so haphazardly as to require dramatic organ music when each is introduced.
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Season one set the bar high. Season two clears it.
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Your investment in the many stories spun out by creator Julian Fellowes may take longer to develop this year, because the costume drama's pace is off in the early going and it's far more contrived and inconsistent than it was in its first season.
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Judging by the first five hours of the second season, it successfully broadens the storylines of several key characters. The cast is first-rate; only Elizabeth McGovern? occasionally rings a false.
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Some of the characters are so simplistically drawn that it's laughable. On the other hand, we love these characters so much and we're having such a jolly good time that we just can't resist Downton Abbey.
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Much grimmer, grayer and (gasp) dowdier. Still mostly wonderful.
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Luckily the characters are so fully formed, and so fully inhabited by the cast, that the whole mess staggers up out of the trenches and keeps going. [9 Jan 2012, p.39]
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Julian Fellowes has created such a vivid group of characters and assembled such an impeccable cast--effortlessly oscillating from comedy to drama--that the hours fly by, addictively pulling viewers from one into the next.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 152 out of 188
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Mixed: 20 out of 188
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Negative: 16 out of 188
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Apr 11, 2012
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Aug 15, 2013
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May 21, 2013