Why do I continue to watch Downton Abbey?

Downton Abbey Cast Season 4

Dynasty Cast Season 6

Maybe the question to myself should be posed in another way, by appending, "And nothing else?"  The New York Times today tried to treat the American fascination with Downton Abbey as a pop cultural phenomenon, a veiled look at the life of contemporary America through the lens of a period British romance spun out of the mind of Julian Fellowes - the writer and creator of the series.  It suddenly occurs to me that this BBC Masterpiece series is not much different from Dynasty, the # 1 American soap opera of the 90s.  That TV series ran for 9 seasons with 220 episodes from 1981 to 1989, while Downton Abbey with its fourth season debuting in the U.S. this Sunday, may be, for all we know, geared to catch up in its longevity and popularity with the vintage American TV drama.

I'm not at all sure, as I write, where this query is going to lead to or what my answer will be at the end of this post.  My take on this is strictly personal; I'm certainly not qualified to speak about contemporary American pop culture, though my life is unavoidably immersed in it, nor to discuss the social significance embedded in D.A.  What especially disqualifies me to speak like a social or cultural critic is the fact that I do not watch, aside from Downton Abbey, any TV dramas--the large array of hip dramatized stories of modern life on TV that supposedly reflect the American Zeitgeist and are often discussed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross.  The cause of this aversion is complicated, visceral rather than rational, like avoiding looking at blood.  I also don't read popular fiction, those appearing on the Time's Best Sellers list or Oprah Winfrey's Book Club reading list or what have you.  In fact the fictions I read are mostly from the late 18th to early 20th century, by authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and the like.  Somehow I feel more at home in those bygone eras.  But why the anachronism?  What is it about those times which speaks to me more than the here and now?  Perhaps I'm an Anglophile; that will explain why Downton Abbey is my cup of tea!  However, with the exception of having the tendency to a stiff upper lip, I can't say that I feel especially akin to the Anglo-Saxon race.

Nor can I say that I'm hooked by the plot lines in the ever-developing saga.  They are more potboilers than great literature, written in a haphazard fashion, dictated by contingencies sometimes (such as Mathew Crawley's untimely death) than the internal logic of the storyline.  What about the characters?  Are they more special than the general human lot?  It is probably fair to say that these people are no better nor worse than the average Joe, then or now, though somewhat glamorized, both those living upstairs and downstairs.

Maybe--here is the anti-climax--what attracts me most is the depiction of the tenor of life in the late 19th, and early 20th century, in both the novels from that period and the period dramas which BBC excels at.  There is a certain quality to it, like strolling in a green field, of taking in life in a calm and orderly way, a certain nicety of speech or manner, which seems to be missing in our lives.  At any rate, life seen at a distance seems to me more palatable than seen in close-up.