Blessed relief has arrived for those of us who love British period dramas but have been unable to stomach “Downton Abbey,” with its blizzards of anachronisms, its absurd soap-operatics, and its Oprah-style oversharing between aristos and servants. We now have something to watch without rolling our eyes: “Parade’s End,” a five-part adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s great novel. It’s a co-production of the BBC, the Flemish public broadcast company VRT, and HBO, which started running it this week. The subtle, intelligent screenplay is by Tom Stoppard, the excellent cast is headed by Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall (with Rupert Everett and Miranda Richardson, among others, in supporting roles), and the visuals are lush.
The two series embody two radically different approaches to the past. If the three episodes I watched before giving up are any guide, “Downton Abbey” is literally a costume drama. The actors wear costumes. The costumes, as far as I can tell, are period-appropriate. Nobody’s wearing jeans, sweatpants, or Nikes—give it that. But the characters behave, treat one another, and, too often, talk as if they were living in Dallas circa 2013 (or, at best, appearing on “Dallas” circa 1980). “Downton Abbey“ has mobilized an online army of anachronism detectives. A costume drama, did I say? No, a costume party. To which everybody wore the same costume.
“Parade’s End,” though, isn’t just a game of dress-up. The characters are fully embedded in the history, customs, language, and moral attitudes of Britain and Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century. They don’t just look it, they live it—and bring it alive.
Not that “Downton Abbey,” a production of the U.K.’s ITV network, is all bad. Without it, we’d never have had this priceless bit of BBC snark, or, closer to home, this.
Read Ian Crouch on “Parade’s End,” the book versus the miniseries.
