February 27, 2013 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 15 west Bergen County can relate to, even though few people in this area have a dozen servants and 100 tenant farmers to worry about. The Earl -- Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville -- is a figure of oaken obstinacy, limited perspective, snobbish predilections, and dumb investments -- yet he has a strong code of honor and personal integrity. He tries to do the right thing, but the right thing as he sees it is maintaining standards of social and religious prejudice that most Americans have long since abandoned without descending into viciousness or vulgarity. His wife Cora (Elizabeth Montgomery) is what used to be called a “dollar princess,” an American whose family swapped a lot of money for a title when she married. Countess Cora is probably modeled after the real-life Countess Almina, fifth countess of Carnovan, said to be the illegitimate and only daughter of Baron Alfred de Rothschild, whose dowry saved Highclere from bankruptcy. Countess Almina was famous for her care of wounded officers in World War I, while her husband was famous for putting up the money for Howard Carter to loot King Tut’s tomb. Most famous of all is the fact that Lord Carnovan’s little dog howled and died at Highclere at exactly the same moment when the earl died in Egypt as Cairo lost the electrical power from five separate generators and blacked out. Brrrr! Significantly, Countess Cora’s maiden name in the series is Levenson, and she operates a World War I hospital at the castle and serves as a moderating influence on the earl’s behavior -just like Countess Almina. Thomas Barrow, the resident gay guy in denial, was a four-square villain in Series One. Barrow made a misguided pass at the Turkish guy, who slapped him away and then coerced him into setting Lady Mary up for a tryst... whereupon the Turkish guy had a heart attack and four astounded upscale women carried his corpse to a different bedroom so reputations could be spared. Then somebody snitched. Barrow also copped a chance to work in a military hospital rather than serve in the trenches during the war. In Series Three, he saved the family team in the cricket match and emerged as a figure worthy of sympathy and respect when he rescued a young servant from muggers and took a fearsome beating in the process. Bates, the resident good guy among the servants, already wounded in World War I, got framed for murder by his crazy first wife, who committed suicide in such a way as to have him blamed for poisoning her. Bates’ mousey second wife becomes a strong heroine in her struggle to get him out of prison. Even her looks improve. The other servants combine comic relief with some serious claims to sympathy and respect. Can pressure from the viewers have given the series a servant-class hero in Bates and a tragic rather than repugnant figure in Barrow? This sort of thing has happened before. “Happy Days” was an enormous hit with U.S. viewers -- I watched the re-runs with my kids in the 1980s, and they loved it -- but “Happy Days” was heavily engineered toward popular audience approval. Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) was a good-hearted tough guy in a black leather jacket in the first few episodes, but when the producers discovered that the hoodish Fonzie was hugely popular with a TV audience that did not remember the 1950s, Fonzie was promoted to the main character while Richie and his college-bound buddies faded into the background. Fonzie became a streetwise hero who could solve any problem. In one episode, Fonzie defeated the fencing champion of France to rebuke his arrogance. Stuff like that does not happen much in real life. Two decades later, “Xena” (Lucy Lawless) was supposed to have been featured in three episodes of the actionfantasy series “Hercules” and then killed off, but Xena proved to be so popular that she got her own series. Xena was either a bad good girl or a good bad girl who headed a band of robbers who turned on her. Xena beat up the bad guys, but as with a lot of action films with Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis, the show bore an uncanny resemblance to a Japanese original, “Chuto” (robbers) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who also supplied the plot of “Rashomon.” In the Japanese-written original of the New Zealand-made “Xena,” the Xena figure, named Shakin, becomes bad to the bone after fending off her stepfather, who married her mother so he could get at Shakin. Shakin protects a mentally challenged girl and her baby and takes good care of her kindly old mother -- but Shakin enjoys tricking guys into killing one another, which is the theme of the story. Shakin is meaner than Xena, but Lawless had her light brown hair dyed jet black and cut in bangs and the shape of her eyes altered with makeup when playing Xena. That is an allusion, not an accident, just as Countess Cora cannot be dismissed as an accident. One has to wonder what will happen with “Downton Abbey” if the British writers follow the American tradition and adapt the script to the desires of the audience. Can Matthew be restored to life by Dr. Alexis Carrell and Charles Lindbergh? Will audiences see Neville Chamberlain show up proclaiming “peace in our time,” while the earl nods in agreement and the others wince? Will Winston Churchill arrive just in the nick of time? I want to find out, and so do a lot of other people. We can all use a vacation from reality on Sunday nights. “I can’t believe it! Is he really dead?” Tuesday morning at a municipal building that shall remain nameless, that was all the staffers could talk about: Is Matthew really dead? What a downer if he really is! Matthew is Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) husband and third cousin once removed of Lady Mary Crawley and father of the long-awaited male heir to “Downtown Abbey.” Not everybody has heard of “Downton Abbey.” Not everybody has heard about the 1960s moon landings, either. People from the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota used to tap my insights as to whether Lady Mary was really going to marry her cousin – a big-time taboo among the Lakota and most other Indians. My daughter, who lives near Silicon Valley in California, says “Downton Abbey” is huge out there, too. PBS obviously depends on “Downton Abbey” to save them from the financial consequences of showing documentaries about science, history, and honest news programs most of the time, because the last episode was climaxed by a 30-minute pledge break during which two Americans offered the audience DVDs of every “Downton Abbey” episode ever broadcast in exchange for three-figure checks to keep PBS afloat. I kept watching in the hope that the last five minutes would break into some word as to whether Matthew was dead or merely disabled. No such luck. Matthew took everything the Kaiser and his Huns could throw at him. He was disabled from the waist down, unexpectedly recovered, and married his distant cousin Lady Mary despite her conflicted loyalty between him and her hidebound father and a clandestine scandal involving a certain deceased Turkish gentleman-scoundrel. Then Matthew got it, as we assume, in an automobile accident in broad daylight on a dry road. They might at least have shown him texting or talking on a cell phone, but this series is said to be about romance rather than relevance. “Downton Abbey” is relevant, however. The estate -actually Highclere Castle, home of the Carnovan family -is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy because the family has not adapted to economic reality. Patrick Buchanan and Thomas Fleming are not lurking behind the drapes to whisper to us that Great Britain is doomed because Germany and the United States have surpassed Britain in manufacturing and world trade, Ireland is leaving, India is restless, and British holdings in Asia will soon be at risk because the British are about to scrap their 20-year mutual aid treaty with Japan -- the one they never talk about in U.S. history -- and let the communists into Shanghai and Hong Kong through the back door. Thomas Branson, the Irish chauffeur -- and later the husband of Lady Sybil, the youngest and most likable of the Crawley daughters -- introduces occasional notes of reality when he talks about “the troubles” and insists that his and Lady Sybil’s daughter be baptized Catholic. He also points out that letting Britain rule Ireland is akin to letting the former Kaiser rule England. Dinner is ruined! Holding an expensive family together in the face of an economic catastrophe is something most people in north- Big downer at Downton Abbey Principal lessons Dater School principal Andrew Matteo helps Webelos from Den 4 earn their Scholar Badge. Surrounding Matteo are Warren, Patrick, David, Nicholas, Deepak, Dylan, Bobby, and Andrew, all of whom are fourth graders at Dater.