Sunday, January 22, 2012

Downton Abbey

Okay, Okay, I know it's not a book. Still it's so good, it could be. I'm hooked. Obsessed. It's everything I fear when picking up a huge novel. And just like a huge novel, I got sucked in. Here's how it started:

With my husband away for two months, I have free rein to watch all the types of movies that he wouldn't want to and the same goes for him, of course. We subscribed to Instant Netflix because of his lack of cable and our instant queue is quite the conglomeration of health food documentaries (me), music documentaries (him), The Girl Who movies (him), and cult children classics like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (me).

So, this past Friday, when a rainy cold sinus-y headache kind of night with a quiet house was looming, I cuddled up on the couch with the dog and some soup. I was looking for some sort of drama, but nothing too sad or emotional, something in the Victorian novel realm.


 I recently watched Sense and Sensibility;  Pride and Prejudice isn't on it (well, not the Colin Firth version); I was feeling lost.

Downton Abbey was available though. I heard of it when I watched the Golden Globes; it won the Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television prize, but I didn't think much of the clips they showed. Then two friends recommended it to me. One saying, "You like period pieces, right? You would really like it."

Hovering the Wii remote over the add-to-instant-queue button, I did whatever I do when I can't make up my mind and texted my friend.

 "Should I watch downtown abbey?" (Note: Yes, I thought it was downtown, and, yes, I don't always use proper capitalization or punctuation in my texts- or writing - and if you say, "But you are an English teacher", we can no longer be friends!).

She responded, "YES. But you haven't watched mad men yet..." (Note: she texts likes me and she's an English teacher too!).

Ah Mad Men. Everyone recommends Mad Men, but I don't have a lot of interest in it. Still, to be a good sport since I made her watch The League, I looked it up. 52 episodes. Too much of a time commitment. Downton only had seven. Downton it was.

So much for not being a time commitment! I watched all seven, hour long episodes straight through, pausing to make some tea and toast around midnight and pausing again at 2:30 to take out my patiently suffering dog.  At 3 in the morning, I headed for bed.

I dreamt of the characters, I dreamt of their story lines. I woke up thinking about them. Upon getting out of bed, I googled the series to see season two would start. I was aghast! Season two already had and it wasn't on Netflix. What was I going to do?!

What I always do. I texted my friend telling her that I stayed up all night watching and it was "So sad how mean they are to each other. I just want to tell them if they all communicated, they could be happy and then there's the irony of knowing what the war's going to bring...".

She told me the war was on in season two and that the first two episodes were available on pbs.org (without commercials) and that episode three would be this Sunday!

My response: "Great. There goes the rest of my weekend...".

Her response: "Only 3 total hours."

That's why I love her.

Two more hours of my weekend have been shot and the third is set to DVR tonight. I tell myself I won't watch it. I tell myself I can wait.

We will see.

In another post, I will be better able to articulate why I love it so much and why it is so much like a novel, but I've been a bit long-winded here...and if I do want to watch it tonight, if I can't wait, I better get some teachery stuff done first.

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