Your Humble Blogger has caught up on Downton Abbey, and yes, all the people who have been complaining are correct. I find it interesting, by the way, that the complaints have not just been on blogs or Slate but on the TV Guide site and in TIME. And, yes, Julian Fellowes and the gang have made a terrible, terrible mistake. I mean. It’s 1920s Yorkshire and we haven’t even seen a coal mine!
Seriously, though, there was something missing, I think, from the various excellent analyses and commentaries—the best of which, I should add, concentrate more on the effect of the sadly typical fridging of Anna Bates (Anna Smith that was) than on the cause. As I was watching, though, I had an additional concern about why they did what they did.
Here’s the thing: John Bates, played by Brendan Coyle, arrives in the first episode as an enigmatic cripple outsider. He battles the Evil Gay Footman to stay in the household and emerges victorious. We discover his dark past of prison and alcoholism, and then the unsuitable blackmailing wife. He’s dismissed his post! He returns! His wife dies! He is arrested for murdering his wife! And through all this, there’s the burgeoning romance between John Bates and the timid and retiring head housemaid Anna Smith, played by Joanne Froggatt. That’s the first two seasons. From the other point of view, Anna… falls in love with John Bates and remains loyal to him. Oh, she is briefly ill, and she provides help and advice to Lady Mary, and gets the lady’s maid promotion made permanent, and most importantly she helps carry the corpse, but nobody even suspects her of gossiping about that, so really she isn’t very important to that plotline, either. Really, for the first two seasons, Anna is the maid who falls in love with Mr. Bates, and that’s it.
In the third series, Anna, now Mrs. Bates, becomes a steely-eyed and persistent seeker after truth. Well, slowly becomes. By the sixth episode, she has found evidence that eventually frees her husband, and at the end of the season they are reunited with lots of acting all around. I would like to point out that both characters and particularly Mr. Bates become the focus of Downton fandom during this season—the Free Bates T-Shirts are the big seller, not (f’r’ex) shirts saying Sylvia Lives or Team Jimmy. I’ll also point out that three actors in large roles left the show by the end of the season, so continuity was at least somewhat of an issue.
When they start outlining the plotlines for the fourth series, then, they know that (a) they have an extremely popular character in Mr. Bates, (2) there is an increasing risk of actors getting bored and frustrated with the whole thing and leaving, and (iii) Anna is still, after three years, largely a blank slate. So. What do they do? They offer Ms. Froggatt an opportunity to commit Acting! in the BBC sense. They offer Mr. Coyle an opportunity to do a heel turn—or more excitingly from an actor’s point of view, to hint at a heel turn, with ominous lighting and silent glowering and lines like “Nothing is over. And nothing is done.” And then he probably kills someone, although naturally we leave open the possibility that it will all turn out to be a mistake, and he isn’t a killer after all. Meat and drink for an actor, I tell you, meat and drink.
So. My point. I don’t know whether Ms. Froggatt went to Mr. Fellowes near the end of last year and said For the love of everything holy give me something to do next season or I will get my coat and walk! I don’t know if Mr. Coyle did. I kinda hope they both did, and that they did it together. But even if they never said anything, the producers must have given some thought—not just to what needs to be done with the characters, but what needs to be done for the actors. And this is what they came up with.
I hope it’s clear that none of this is excusing them from the criticism levied at them—I think correctly. They had options. They chose the way they chose and they are responsible for that. And the fact that Mr. Bates had become such a successful character, and that an Anna-and-Mr. Bates subplot was judged necessary to the show’s continued popularity is itself a bit of an indictment of the patriarchy, in my opinion. Which, I must say, is an excellent reason for those of us who care about the show (and I still do, amazingly enough) to keep complaining and keep boosting those complaints, so that perhaps next season, or the one after, Mr. Fellowes and his associates will judge it necessary to the show’s continued popularity to make Anna the subject of a subplot that really is about her—or lose Ms. Froggatt to a better show.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.