Entertainment

Mind your manners

The Crawleys and their servants line up in front of Downton Abbey to await the arrival of Lady Cora’s mother, Martha Levinson, for Lady Mary and Matthew’s wedding. (AP)

Maggie Smith meets her wisecracking match in Shirley MacLaine. (AP)

Holy fiscal cliff.

Will the Crawleys, television’s beloved aristocrats, have to sell Downton Abbey? Pass the smelling salts or pour yourself a stiff gin because as Season 3 of the wildly popular British costume opens, it appears that Lord Robert Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) has squandered his wife’s fortune on a bad bet, just as his daughter, the haughty Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), is prepared to break the bank on her wedding to Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens).

“He’s made a catastrophic financial investment which puts the estate in jeopardy,” says Hugh Bonneville, in a sunny lounge at the Essex House, where the cast is nesting while doing a round of publicity for American media outlets. While not outfitted in his “Downton” black-or-white tie, the British actor still cuts an extremely distinguished figure with his formal manner and his outfit — a black tweed three-piece suit with a striking purple necktie. “The money Cora brought [to Downton] as a result of marrying into the British aristocracy is now tied up. It’s part of the estate. It’s not necessarily his money or her money. It’s the estate’s money.”

And it’s gone. How the Crawleys attempt to recover it provides the narrative engine for the first two episodes of “Downton Abbey,” which spans about 18 months starting in 1920. England has come through the Great War and the family has survived a flu epidemic. Matthew, it seems, stands to inherit quite a bit of money from his late wife Lavinia’s father’s estate.

The heir to Downton Abbey, Matthew wants to live more simply, perhaps do without servants, a notion that goes against everything that Lord Crawley and his family hold dear.

“While Robert’s in a charge, he wants to see the estate as a machine that works well,” Bonneville says. That means keeping the large staff employed. “If they didn’t have jobs, what else would they have? As Mr. Carson says, ‘Downton is the only family I’ve had.’ Matthew is innately a modernizer. He doesn’t need or want a valet.”

As Matthew drags his father-in-law kicking and screaming into the modern era, Lady Mary and Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith), join forces to hit up Martha Levinson, Cora’s mum, at Downton for the wedding, for money to keep the old place going.

Martha is played by Shirley MacLaine, the series’ first bit of stunt casting. If the show needed an American actress brave enough to go toe-to-toe with Smith in the legend department, MacLaine wasn’t a bad choice. Between them, the actors, both 78, have a century of stage-and-screen experience.

“She in no way let any of us down. She completely lived up to her reputation,” says Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Lady Cora and is prettier and younger in person. “There’s hardly anything you can write that goes further than the image of those two women standing in that great hall together. Still standing after all these years.”

“Masterpiece” executive producer Rebecca Eaton says MacLaine’s arrival (it’s only for two episodes) adds a piece of “social history” to the show. Creator Julian Fellowes is exploring an “Anglo-American relationship” with Martha and Violet.

“We always need something from the other, whether it’s freedom or money. That’s why those rich Americans sent their daughters to go over to England and marry those Brits,” she says. “It gave them a veneer of class. But we also got a souffle of comic acting.”

Attracting a star of MacLaine’s stature came as no surprise when “Downton Abbey” went viral last winter. There were “DA” paper dolls. There were affectionate spoofs of the show on “Saturday Night Live,” Jimmy Fallon’s talk show and one created for the Web called “Downton Arby” that featured the actor Richard Kind as a British aristocrat eating American fast food. The show’s stars were cast in movies (Jessica Brown-Findlay, who plays Sybil, will be in “Winter’s Tale”) and on Broadway (Dan Stevens co-stars in “The Heiress”). And Fellowes, who writes every “Downton” script, was signed to create a dramatic series about America’s Gilded Age for NBC.

After years of being shackled with its own high-minded cobwebs, PBS is cool again.

“The tea leaves are looking very good for the third season,” says Eaton. “There is a huge appetite for the show. Things could not be better aligned.”

She thinks the show’s old-fashioned portrayal of romance — and its costumes — are the draw.

“The show appeals to the same college-age women who watch ‘Girls.’ They love the cliffhanger love stories. They love the frocks. The characters are so clearly drawn. The show gives people whatever they used to get from soap opera. They love attaching themselves to characters come back again and again.”

But McGovern says that “Downton Abbey” also succeeds because it’s able to mock the morals and manners of these hopeless aristocrats who don’t know that the 1929 crash is about to smack them upside the head.

“There’s a wit, a sending up of itself that’s inherent in everything we do. Yet it’s never our approach,” she says. “Every scene is almost a spoof within itself. Even as we’re doing it. I think it’s why people love it as well.”

Whatever the magic formula is, Eaton wants “104” seasons of “Downton Abbey.”

“I’ll take as many as I can get,” says Eaton, who won’t comment on reports that Stevens will not return to the show in Season 4, which starts shooting in February.

But Bonneville knows that the series will end in good time.

“Whether we do a fifth season, I don’t know,” he says. “As long as Julian has his hands all over it, which he does in a benevolent way, I think the quality will maintain. Put it this way: I can’t imagine there being a Season 10 cause we’ll all be in wheelchairs.”

DOWNTON ABBEY

Today, 9 p.m., PBS