Measuring up to Downton

Looks like the BBC and I've made the same mistake - that is to expect that a series which should rightly be judged on its own merits could in some way compare with Downton Abbey. In the Beeb's case, they axed the new series of Upstairs Downstairs, allegedly because its ratings were less than half of those for Downton Abbey. I'm yet to find out if they did the right thing as I haven't watched the latest Upstairs Downstairs episodes - and admittedly, I have grave doubts that it will work without Eileen Atkins's eccentric upper-class bohemian. Here's the rub, though. Those "poor ratings" amounted to 4.45 million viewers. That's half the population of Sweden! I know there are tons more people living in Great Britain, but still - we're talking millions here. Just because Downton Abbey drew 10.5 million viewers, does that necessarily make 4.45 million bad? "Only" 400.000 watched The Killing (no, I haven't seen it, and yes, the sweater looks kinda nice on pictures - shame it obviously doesn't machine-wash), but no-one is calling that a flop.

I can see the problem, though. Upstairs Downstairs was meant to cater to exactly the same crowd as Downton, and yet not even half of them tuned in, even when there's ages to go to the next Downton series. Let's face it, though, the Thirties and the Second World War are not the ideal setting for a comfy costume drama in the family saga vein (you could argue the First World War isn't either, but we didn't see that much of it in Downton anyway). In view of that, 4.45 million is a pretty good showing.

My own "looking for the new Downton" mistake lay in hoping that a drama about the Titanic would somehow not be depressing and involve a lot of deaths just because Julian Fellowes scripted it. After all, he managed to keep First World War casualties at an acceptable level in Downton Abbey. But then that series wasn't called, say, World War One. In the case of the Titanic, depicting the horror and heartache of a famous shipwreck comes first, and keeping the costume drama punters happy comes a very poor second. True, the first three episodes featured as many romances as any schmaltzy love-on-a-cruiser film, but what's the point when it all ends in death and destruction? As so often with disaster scenarios, there are a lot of scenes where you find yourself groaning "just get in the boat, you fool". Frankly, it's hard to care about characters who whine "I'm not leaving without you", and treat a sinking ship as if it were a train station platform where you have all the time in the world to look lovingly into each other's eyes, while there are other luckless passengers who don't even get within waving distance of a lifeboat. Not leaving? Fine. Get out of the way and drown.

The series is the bleaker for not having an epilogue telling us something about what happened to the surviving characters afterwards. There's a good Swedish word for the kind of winding-down scenes at the end that almost every drama benefits from having - eftersnack, meaning approximately "after-the-event-natter". Here, there is no after-the-event-nattering at all, one of the consequences being that I'm still not one hundred percent certain about who lived and who died. It's clear enough in most cases, I suppose - but did the stoker make it, for instance?

In spite of smuggling in a sort-of-decent-toff (who's no patch on the Earl of Grantham if you ask me), it's clear Fellowes wanted to make something completely different than Downton Abbey. If you're fascinated with the Titatic disaster, this is the series for you (you'll also get your prejudices pandered to in some cases - I absolutely refuse to believe the "it will upset the ladies" line got a second airing after the too-few-lifeboats-blunder, especially in connection with locking Italian waiters in and leaving them to drown). If you're a Downton Abbey fan - give it a miss and keep waiting.