Reflections on a Downton Abbey episode or how I learn to stop procrastinating and write my own damn novel

*** Please note this contains spoilers for Season 4 of Downton Abbey - if you think knowing what happens can spoil it any more than than the lack of interesting storylines ***

I suppose the fact I watch Downton Abbey confirms a level of my cliché.  I’m not exactly sure what the cliché is, but I do make a point to watch it each week.  Last year I became a WGBH member so I could get the DVD and consume it in a rapid pace.  This year I still tune in, but don’t feel like life is missing anything if I delay that viewing to binge watch House of Cards.

Last night, I caught up with the broadcasts.  It was another sleepy plotline, but rich with 1920’s pin curls and A line dresses so I was satisfied enough.  Enough.  There was a story within the episode that had potential to make the show more interesting and possibly more powerful.  But it didn’t.

It is easy, of course, to critique popular television shows getting fatigued in their fourth season.  Especially after the exit of some major characters and with them some of the more compelling reasons to watch the show.  It’s also easy to criticize from this side of the pond on my couch, with a glass of wine in hand.  Basically, it’s always easy to criticize someone else’s writing.  Especially when one is doing everything (including watching shows in which she is only minorly interested) to avoid writing her own manuscript.

So maybe I should thank Downton Abbey for putting this little bee in my bonnet this morning, so I will walk away from Netflix and Facebook and actually pull up a word document on a winter Saturday morning.  To force me to wrap my head around how to tell this sort of plot.

 

Now that I’ve made my verbose disclaimers, I’ll say I took major issue with the story of Jack and Rose.  Aside from the obviously stupid allusion to the other pop culture story of a couple from the early 20^th century, I think the story was a lost opportunity and weak attempt to be honest about the complications of the 1920s – outside of declining manors and how widows find happiness.  

Anyone who reads my blog or my Facebook knows race is something that I perpetually question and try to look at without veneer.  And maybe anyone who reads this blog is tired of me making issues when they are “unnecessary” (one of the most common retorts to raising this question).  But, well… Downton Abbey brought this issue to the fore.

I think they were just trying to throw a bone to the critics who lamented the cast was pretty alabaster.  They also needy a juicy storyline to give to the Sybil replacement.  And indeed, this could have been the thing to do both, but the interracial romance was so… unromantic.  There was the prerequisite conflict inserted when they were discovered… and a neat and tidy dissolution – complete with a (we, the writers from 2013, are not really racist, but we have to write this period appropriate scene so let’s make sure your imagination suspends the disbelief of timeliness and doesn't label us racist) disclaimer that if it were another time, Jack would not walk away and, of course, our beloved Mary would totally embrace her cousin running off with a black jazz musician.  Gag.

Now, of course, I haven’t seen the final episode.  Maybe the plot thickens.  Maybe there is more intrigue for Jack and I’ll find this blog outdated in a matter of days… but it doesn’t diminish the way that exchange of dialogue made me … sad and not just a little bit angry.

Angry, mostly, at myself for not finishing my book (which in the spirit of spoilers), has an interracial romance in the early 20^th century- plus another pair of couples later in history… but this one has not just a few parallels to the Downton plot (or lack of plot).  I like to think mine has actual romantic tension… or a reason for the couple to be in love aside from an impish desire to displease one’s mother.  It also has a conscious of the fear, the stupidity… and the hubris of the young… that has much more tragic consequences than a cup of tea and a politically correct disclaimer.

But this lament isn’t really to compare my writing to the Masterpiece factory.  They are two separate animals.  It is… a pondering of the audience (the cliché to which I like to think myself belonging) that finds the Jack Rose plot perfectly acceptable.  That the neat and tidy telling of racial tension is the way to tell those stories.  Not the fiction that holds up a messy, squirmy reflection of our own time.  Or does the audience simply like the story because no one asks the question?  And do we just not ask the questions because we are afraid of making our fellow members of the cliché audience feel messy and squirmy?

And by we, I mean me.  And by me not asking the question, I mean to say I should stop writing this and go work on my novel.