TV - Belgravia (2020)

So, finally got around to watching the 2020 6-part series BELGRAVIA, created by Julian Fellowes (based on his novel), the creator of DOWNTON ABBEY, and with much of the same production team as DOWNTON.

Now, I had a bit of a journey with DOWNTON, which lasted six seasons and 52 episodes from 2010 to 2015 (and to date two subsequent films). I started watching it just as it was ending, and it wound up taking me about three years to finish it. I'd usually watch five or six episodes at a steady clip, two or three a week, usually enjoying it, but it would take very little to distract me from that and I'd wind up not watching it for a few months until the next time I had nothing to watch and remember DOWNTON. I guess on balance I'd have to say I liked it, but by the end it was really a sense of wanting to finish what I started that kept me going at the end rather than pure joy (and of course now they keep doing movies, it'll probably never end).

So that was what I was expecting of BELGRAVIA, which is set in a similar milieu of British upper class society, although almost a century earlier. I expected to like it, and since it was only six episodes (with no sign of a second season two years later), under five hours, I was hoping it could hold my attention.

It far exceeded that. This was everything I liked about DOWNTON and almost nothing I hated about it, compacted into a tight little package. I was expecting it to take a few weeks to watch, and instead I ended up watching the first four in one sitting, and pretty much had to force myself not to continue on to the next two, and instead savour them the next day, with a few hours between them. Just a delight. About the only thing it was missing was someone like Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess character from DOWNTON, which was probably for the best since that would have invited unenviable comparisons.

Now, no illusions on the actual quality of the thing, it's obviously a soap opera about people with a ridiculous level of mostly unearned wealth and the problems they mostly create for themselves with their rigid class structure, and a few of the twists are frankly a little ridiculous in an effort to wrap everything up with a nice bow (I spent most of the last episode wondering if they were going to do something bold and out of left field before they mostly wrapped it up in genre conventions). But for what it was I enjoyed it immensely, far beyond what I had any right to expect. The cast was mostly perfect (as usual for such things I sometimes had trouble telling the endless parade of middle aged white men apart), the script had a lot of humour, the sets and costume looked great (I'm sure it was all anachronistically clean and polished, but I've got no way to judge). I think I might watch the whole thing again someday, and might even read Fellowes' novel.