Shortly before the third season of Downton Abbey aired in the United States in 2013, 62-year-old teacher Laurie set her pupils an unusual assignment. “My sixth grade English class had the same homework for a week – root for me to win tickets to see the premiere,” she says.
Clearly their collective positive thinking paid off. Laurie ended up securing tickets to a special New York City screening of the new series, as well as a meet and greet with the cast of Julian Fellowes’ upstairs-downstairs period drama. “I got the email about winning during class and was able to announce it to the kids,” she recalls. “They were so happy.” She also told them that if she happened to be mysteriously absent the day afterwards, “it would be because Hugh Bonneville would have asked me back to England. I took the next day off, so there was quite a rumour running around school.”
Downton, with all its under-butlers and china tea sets and shooting parties and infinitesimal class distinctions, is the old-fashioned ideal of a Very British TV Show – and from the moment it first aired on PBS in 2011, Americans haven’t been able to get enough of it. Laurie is just one of its legions of fans across the Atlantic. She and her friends would hold “weekly viewing parties to watch together”, experiencing the Crawley family’s highs and lows en masse. And once she even received a lifesize cardboard cut-out of Bonneville as a gift – on the day that the first film premiered in 2019, she “brought him along to a restaurant as a joke to dine with my friends before the show. People came from all over the restaurant to take photos with him.”
If you read back through accounts of America’s Downton fever from the mid-2010s, you’ll find similar stories of group screenings, from Brooklyn bars to Midwest retirement communities. The appeal of the series wasn’t necessarily confined to a particular demographic. Stylist Hallie Abrams, who is based between Ohio and Florida, tells me that Downton sparked a love of period pieces for her and her husband. “It’s ironic because my husband is a jock,” she says. “He was a professional soccer player for a while, and an all-round athlete. But we both really enjoyed Downton Abbey.” The so-called “man cave” set up in their basement with a big TV for watching sport soon became repurposed as a venue for the couple and their young daughter to catch up with the Crawleys.
Greer, who spent the first 25 years of her life in the States before moving to the UK 12 years ago, recalls being introduced to the show by an anglophile college roommate. “I just remember sitting down with her and being like, ‘Oh, this is a cute British show!’” she says. “It became a roommate thing, where we all watched it, with four of us living in the house.” There was a “quaint” quality that appealed, she explains. “Our country is only 250 years old, compared to England, which is so much older.”
At the height of its popularity in the States, the then first lady Michelle Obama reportedly requested preview DVDs from ITV top brass so that she wouldn’t have to wait around for the next batch of episodes (seasons typically aired in the US a few months after they premiered in the UK, much to the chagrin of American Downton-ites). Bonneville, aka the family’s good-natured patriarch Lord Grantham, and Elizabeth McGovern, who plays his onscreen wife Cora, even attended a state dinner at the White House.
Hollywood stars such as Harrison Ford and George Clooney were part of the show’s fanbase, too, with the latter appearing as a charming American visitor to the abbey in a charity sketch for ITV’s Text Santa campaign. It even got namechecked in a political scandal, surely the true hallmark of notoriety. “A congressman destroyed his career when he used campaign funds to decorate his office in the Downton style,” recounts Julie Taddeo, research professor of British history at the University of Maryland. In the 15 years since the series started, she says she has “given more public history lectures on Downton Abbey and the real history of the period it covers than any other topic I research”.
Downton came to a sort-of end in the States in 2016 (a few months after British viewers bid a temporary adieu to Lord and Lady Grantham et al), but has since spawned three spin-off films, with the third and ostensibly final movie arriving in cinemas on 12 September. Almost a decade on, it remains the most-watched drama in the public broadcaster’s history: at its pinnacle in season four, it was drawing an average audience of 13.3 million weekly viewers.
Downton, with all its under-butlers and china tea sets and shooting parties and infinitesimal class distinctions, is the old-fashioned ideal of a Very British TV Show
When the first film came out, ticket sales in the United States and Canada accounted for almost half of its worldwide box office takings ($96.9m of a $194.7m total). The next movie, 2022’s A New Era, followed a similar pattern, with the US and Canada pulling in $44.1m of a global total of $92.7m. Maggie Smith’s acerbic Dowager Countess may have grumbled that “Americans never understand the importance of tradition”, but in this instance she was wrong, or at least a little shortsighted.
The irony of all this, of course, is that the United States is a country born out of a war against British rule, and one that has always prided itself on egalitarianism. So why the obsession with a show turned movie franchise that the British historian Simon Schama once scathingly referred to as “a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery”? There’s a paradox at play, Taddeo suggests. “Americans don’t have an aristocracy or a royal family – we pride ourselves on that, while at the same time we can’t get enough of these stories about elites,” she says. “Fellowes has managed to appeal to our conflicted attitudes about this,” she adds, by making the aristocrats “likeable with relatable problems”.
Laurie agrees. “I think American storytelling champions the underdog, and certainly the servant class [in the show] hits that mark,” she says. “But Downton also made the Granthams vulnerable, despite their fading power. We tend to dislike those in entitled positions, but viewers could see value and redeeming qualities in someone like Lord Grantham, where I think American TV would have painted him as less sympathetic and more ruthless.”
Lord Grantham, who demonstrates a close bond with his butler (Jim Carter’s venerable Carson) and valet (Brendan Coyle’s Mr Bates) and an overriding drive to do the right thing (even if, shock horror, it involves welcoming an Irish chauffeur into the family as his son-in-law), is the epitome of noblesse oblige. Taddeo reckons that this represented an appealing fantasy to Americans, coming as it did in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. “We all want to believe that our employer will care about us into our old age, when in truth we know how disposable our labour has become in this economy,” she says.
Highclere Castle, the Hampshire country house that served as the show’s main filming location, has become a popular site of pilgrimage for American Downton aficionados. David, a longtime fan from Tennessee, headed to Highclere last summer, “which was a personal highlight for me”. He fondly recalls the warm welcome he and his group of fellow travellers were given by the personal assistant of Lady Carnarvon (the Countess of Carnarvon, who oversees the running of the stately home), “from the tea we were served, to the special gift book that we unexpectedly received”. In real life, though, “the rooms in the house felt smaller than I expected”, he adds, “which our lovely tour guide said was a common reaction from tourists”.
Laurie, meanwhile, has visited the Castle twice, and hails it as being “like Disney World for Downton fans – the happiest place on earth. Even the cabbie who drove us from the train station to the castle was full of stories about having had actors in his car over the years.”
The fans I speak to seem to agree that, following the Dowager Countess’s death in the second movie and Smith’s passing off screen, it’s the right time for the franchise to bow out with one last hurrah. “We need this third and final film to honour her and hopefully provide a satisfying ending for these beloved characters,” David says.
If younger versions of the characters were to, say, crop up in Fellowes’ American series The Gilded Age, Laurie adds, “that would be great” – but “there is something about this story told by these people that was lightning in a bottle”. Way back at the start of the series, we learned that the Downton estate could only stay afloat because Lord Grantham had married a wealthy “dollar princess” from Ohio. Perhaps it’s quite apt, then, that it’s the show’s US fans that seem to be keeping the cult of the Crawleys going.
‘Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale’ is in cinemas from 12 September
