Carol Spradling

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS The writers of this show had a chance for a home run - and they miffed it due to the stupidest writing mistakes this side of grammar school. They created compelling characters. Cast excellent actors. Obviously they didn't have a huge budget but there is visual panache and some true moments of drama... but... HERE COME THE SPOILERS... They cried wolf. They kept threatening to hang/shoot/flog characters only for a plot-convenient deus ex machina to rescue the character. If Game of Thrones can axe Sean Bean in season 1, this soap opera can off a main character or two, or stop threatening to off them. And honestly - everything is too chubby/clubby. Would the Governor of NSW really allow a convict woman to upbraid him over and over as Elizabeth does? Would soldiers capitulate to convicts bursting into their HQ, taunting them, betting their rum on a game of poker with a convict who boasts of his cheating, and still let them have the rum? They could have had so much. They had INTERESTING potential plot arcs that could have risen above hysteria and soap opera. I'd watch an entire show about Letters Malloy. I'd watch an entire back-story show about "JEfferson", the convict who escaped to the bush and survived. I thought they'd at least show ONE INDIGENOUS PERSON during the many arcs where characters go into the wilds - nope. The Governor talks about birthing a new nation in front of a whole lot of white people, though. Feel like I've seen that concept before, somewhere... hmmm.. Wish they'd not squandered their opportunity. Wish there was a season 2. Glad to have seen many of the actors' performances and will seek them out in more fulfilling material.

Even a Yank knows that upper-class English people in 1800 would not have melodramatic conversations over the breakfast table about having gotten the maid pregnant. Likewise, even a Yank knows that well-to-do Brits don't walk around grinning at everyone and everything. I found the Indian actors and Lesley Nicol wonderful. The costumes and locations are sumptuous; the dialogue risible. ALL the characters are straight out of silent movie-era central casting; tired tropes without internal lives, without truth - except a few white men. Even those characters are boring as dirt. This is a story about white men with agency (even the Snidely Whiplash villain), and women/actors of color as set dressing. There are super interesting character stories that could have been told from the point of view of, say, the butler Badal (he obviously grew up in poverty and now works in a palace. How did he get there? How does he feel about these white masters?), the nurse Maya (a wet nurse who travels with baby August... which means she has children of her own... where are they? When does she see them? How does that affect her?). One thing Downton did exceptionally well was to portray fleshed out characters from the cook to the chauffeur to the lord of the manor to his wife and daughters... this is a story set in India where the Indians are there either as comic relief or as mannequins for the glorious costumes. The women are accessories to the story and are tired cliches - the "matronly" mother; the "snooty" aristocrat; the "exotic" native girls. Ooof. Run. Run fast.