Lady Mary’s sad. Lady Edith’s glad. And the Dowager Countess is just… bad.
That’s a preview of the fourth season of “Downton Abbey.” These crumbs are interspersed with a tea service of best-of clips from the first three seasons of the most popular series in PBS history on Sunday night’s special preview.
Hosted by Susan Sarandon — who claims to be a huge fan of the series even though she’s always bragging to reporters that she doesn’t own a TV set — the retro hour serves as a “refresher course” of the series’ major plotlines — i.e., just how a commoner like Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) came to inherit the manor house to begin with) that will help newcomers to the ‘Downton’ phenomenon put everything together before the long-awaited season premiere Jan. 5.
After dispensing with some Power Point presentation p.r. about the show’s global reach — ”It shows everywhere, from Israel to Iceland!” — Sarandon drops a bombshell: someone viewers love to hate is leaving their employ and the house is all a-twitter. There is much scurrying about as the servants absorb the news.
As if marking time till Sarandon can deliver the next snippet of delicious news, various behind-the-scenes personnel pontificate on the show’s importance and what it’s been up to — as if we are all sitting in a lecture hall at Oxford and not in front of our televisions — in describing what happened to Britain at the end of the aristocratic age.
“It takes place at the end of a thousand years of what was a quasi-feudal system,” Sarandon reminds us. I’ll be sure to put that in my “Downton” dissertation!
In between such gaseous and unnecessary utterances, we are treated to scenes of what made the show so much fun to watch and how the show gave a clutch of great actors so many wonderful scenes to play.
It would be a shame to think that the creators are not having as much fun making the show as we are watching it.
Luckily, just when the voiceovers are becoming a bit too pedantic, Sarandon butts in with another Season 4 bombshell: Lady Mary inherits all of Matthew’s financial interest in Downton Abbey! This indeed sets up some potential juicy conflict, especially if her father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), tries to wrest that control away from her. Let us not forget that when “Downton” returns, the show will be in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, with the Depression and the collapse of the aristocracy not that far off.
Clutch your pearls for the last time, Lady Violet.
Most welcome among the sneak previews is the news that Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) may finally get a break. Long the butt of Internet jokes, this middle Crawley sister has had a one-way ticket to spinsterhood, but it looks like she might actually snag a husband in Season 4.
Sarandon saves the best for last. In a clip that hasn’t been seen anywhere, family upstart Lady Rose (Lily James) masquerades as a maid to make a play for a young man on the scene. Kisses in the dark: Something to look forward to on “Downton Abbey.”