https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-05-17/what-downton-abbey-doesnt-show-you-the-dark-side-of-life-as-a-servant-in-britains-mansions.html
The fictional one about Catherine the Great is good because it shows them literally burning serfs and servants during a plague and the nobles will just straight up kill servants for fun. Bonus for having enlightenment thinkers show up and be just as awful (Voltaire comes to the Winter Palace in season 2 and is shown as an awful person)
Yeah, pretty solid show. It's a bit lib, but they don't show enlightenment ideas as a grand solution and present the life of serfs as absolutely awful and at the whim of tyrants.
Definitely better than most other period dramas due to it's lax handling of history and focus on satire. Got some Armando Iannucci vibes from it.
It's the same with media set in current times. Unless it is specific to the entire plot, the default is a Mayo PMC family that never has to worry about money.
I'm AMAZED that the people who spent 16 hours a day working, slept in closets, and had to crawl through secret passageways so as not to disturb their masters weren't a bunch of chipper blokes who were super proud to have only one day off a year.
One of my earliest seed of radicalism is when I was reading the history of the British empire and thinking "With this massive empire and wealth concentrated in such small island, why do they still have poor people?"
My house literally only has servants stairs. Nearly all the other houses I have been in have had regular stairs. But at home the people who built this thing in the 50's decided to make it impossible to walk down.
What really, I can't believe Downtown Abby, a show about how cool and dramatic it is to be a parasitic vestigial feudal aristocrat that contributes nothing to society, glamorize the ruling class and whitewashes their abuse of the workers. Shocked.
i watched the new one from the Downton Abbey guy on HBO, The Guilded Age, which takes place in the US (NYC BABY WE GOT BODEGAS!) in something like the 1880s. i do not know why, but for some reason i expected it to have some kind of critique, however minor, about the inequality present in the system... and not just be about the conflict between New Money and Old Money while painting New Money as being kinda virtuous because of assumed meritocracy. whoops, turns out it's the latter.
anyway, it's total trash and somehow even less self-aware that Downton. after an episode or two, i realized it was just about socialite bullshit infighting between the capitalist class so i just started watching it, rooting for everyone to be scandalized by each other and ruin each others' good times. at one point, some new money guy ruins an old money guy so hard, the old money guy kills himself. we're supposed to be like, "oh that's awful", but i was like "lol, lmao."
i also kept imagining some ultraviolent, off-the-rails union enforcers or insurrectionary partisans would burst into the scene and just start lighting people up, but that never happens. instead, the two big arcs are like some engenue almost getting seduced by a rakish cad and a new money mother leveraging her daughters debutante social event to catapult herself into high society.
honestly, if someone re-imagined either of these shows and caught people off guard with a sudden turn mid-season into an accurate portrayal of working conditions and abuse, it might traumatize the audience. like do eps 1-3 just how they currently do them, side step anything showing the workers and focus on some b.s. with the elites. then a subplot opens up and we finally follow a house worker for like half an episode, into the fields and factories that extract the wealth. overseas onto the plantations. it becomes clear in the next episode that our Great Men are, in fact, fully aware of precisely how it all works, hiring sadistic goons and cutting wages, disappearing organizers, and generally abusing their staff etc.
like a Breaking Bad type of arc, where the protagonist becomes the antagonist, but accelerated and driven by the expanding perspective.
The irony is that Gosford Park, which supposedly inspired Downton Abbey (same writer, iirc it was supposed to be a spinoff), IS very much self-aware, and a very sharp critique of that society. Likely Altman's influence. Great movie, shame I don't think that's what most viewers got out of it at the time though.
so i just started watching it, rooting for everyone to be scandalized by each other and ruin each others’ good times. at one point, some new money guy ruins an old money guy so hard, the old money guy kills himself. we’re supposed to be like, “oh that’s awful”, but i was like “lol, lmao.”
Legitimately I'm not convinced that is the isn't the intended way to watch it.
I enjoy the show if I think of the whole thing as a satire. Like the Lord of the manor gets an ulcer so bad he sprays B movies level horror gore all over the fancy party dining room in an episode.
How is that not the product of a hilarious satirist?
i don't really understand how back then people didn't just gank these rich fucks while they slept.
I mean, think about how service people are treated today on cruiseships and stuff. Of course this would have been even more horrible.
back-breaking work, no free time, and cruel masters
This is just life in America for the vast majority of people
To people that never had to work a service job or knew somebody that did it's apparently a wild thing to find out that wait staff, in particular women, are demeaned, under-tipped, sexually harassed, the whole fucking thing.
Like that meme going around these days: my brother in christ, it was you who was renting a servant for 12.99 an entree this entire time.
