Of 'Downton' and 'The Hour' Brits, Brody, Caitlin Moran & Abe Lincoln

Cheerio and good day! I trust you all had a Happy Christmas and a bloody good time of it on New Year's . . . aw, forget it . . . there's no way I can maintain a cartoonishly dodgy British accent for the length of this sentence, never mind this entire post. Why the feeble attempt? I've come down with a terrible case of Brit fever over the past few weeks.

From a comedic literary romp through modern femininity, to a 1920s English manor, a 1950s British TV newsroom and the outstanding work of U.K. native Damian Lewis playing a U.S. war hero-turned terrorist-turned double agent in Homeland and another Londoner portraying one of the most storied U.S. presidents, I've been positively awash in English pop culture, when I'm not listening to Adele tunes that is.

Here's a little taste of the U.K. pop culture nuggets that have been whetting my whistle as of late:

The Hour

After watching and reviewing the first season of the BBC's The Hour last year, I'm now engrossed by season two which is about to wrap up its second season on BBC America. (You could watch season one and season two DVDs -- the second one is available for sale on Jan. 8 -- or catch both seasons via Amazon Instant Video.)

Set in the 1950s in a BBC television newsroom, The Hour's like a more down-to-earth, hybrid of Mad Men and a humble cousin of HBO's The Newsroom (meaning no one's a walking, talking, eloquently elitist, pompous, inhuman speech-making machine). The Hour's chief protagonists include the program's doggedly tenacious producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), the brilliant yet brittle reporter/on air talent Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) and the ruins of the internally smoldering anchorman Hector Madden (Dominic West) who's haunted by his war time experiences.

During its sophomore season, the gang has been bustling around trying to expose an organized crime ring which blackmails famous and influential Brits who can't keep it in their pants. Color me besotted with this cool period period sans an anti-hero like Don Draper (though I'd wager that Don would take quite the shining to Ms Rowley before dumping her as he did with other smart, professionally driven women like Rachel Menken and Faye Miller).

Downton Abbey

First, a beef, which shall be written in all caps so feel free to interpret it as me yelling in a coarse manner as I knit my brow and attempt to fashion a menacing look:

WHILE TRYING TO LOCATE THE EXACT DETAILS OF THE SEASON THREE PREMIERE OF THIS SHOW, I WAS PERUSING AN AMERICAN-BASED ENTERTAINMENT WEB SITE, WHICH SHALL REMAIN UNNAMED TO PROTECT THE MORONIC, I SAW A GINORMOUS SPOILER ABOUT SEASON THREE OF DOWNTON ABBEY WHICH HAS ALREADY AIRED IN ENGLAND. THE SPOILER WAS IN THE HEADLINE. YOU NINCOMPOOPS! IN THE HEADLINE!

. . . there, now I feel a tad better as I float along on the bubbles of anticipation having just re-watched the season two finale of the Masterpiece Theater melodrama Downton Abbey and anxiously await the start of the new season this weekend. When last the American viewers left off, it was 1920 and Downton's star-crossed lovers were in a warm embrace amid the snowflakes as poor Mr. Bates sat in a jail cell having been found guilty of murder. (In fact, I think his name should officially be changed to "poor Mr. Bates." Indeed.)

As we approach the season premiere on PBS this Sunday, we Downton fans are girding ourselves to watch as a brash American blasts through the Downton doors in the person of Shirley MacLaine, playing Cora's (Elizabeth McGovern) rich, uncouth mother. I cannot wait to not only watch the proper Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) run up against American sensibilities in the guise of his mum-in-law and witness the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) bristle at American audacity.

While I'm hoping we see more of the rebellious, pregnant Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) and her socialist Irish hubby, the love story between Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) and Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) is the beating heart of the series and I am interested in how their relationship will progress after such a protracted, tremulous separation.

Then there's poor Mr. Bates. *sigh*

Homeland

*Warning, spoilers from season two finale of Homeland ahead.*

Brit Damien Lewis absolutely wowed me with his thoroughly American depiction of the troubled former POW-terrorist-Congressman-CIA asset-Carrie Mathison's lover-dude on the run. I'm still not sure where his character, Nick Brody's loyalties lie even after watching the season two finale twice after it grabbed me by the collar and made me say, "What?! . . . No way!"

Is Brody essentially a good guy who was truly broken by his brutal torture and emotional abuse while in captivity? Does he really want a fresh start now that his captor/collaborator is dead? Or is his just playing Carrie (Claire Danes) in order to save his hide or to perhaps attack on another day?

It was genius for the writers to allow Carrie and Brody to not only hook up again, but to afford her the chance to doubt his sincerity again (when she drew the gun on him) as well as to prove to her superiors that her instincts were spot-on when it came to her declaration that he'd been turned while in captivity. The show's premise was, by the end of the season two finale, wiped clean, like Brody had told Carrie he wanted his life to be . . . until his suicide video was released and his name was publicly tarnished.

Cannot even imagine what is ahead for season three. It's been a wild ride thus far. You can watch episodes on iTunes or on Amazon Instant Video.

Lincoln

In addition to seeing The Hobbit with our kids during the Christmas vacation (as I kept texting my husband, "How LONG is this movie?!" and was thankful I'd caffeinated up beforehand), I was fortunate enough to have recently been able to see Lincoln in the theaters as well.

Watching the excellent work of London-born Daniel Day-Lewis as he brought an American president to life, the film made politics appear to be a flesh-and-blood human endeavor, full of flawed acts and flawed people, sprinkled with compassion, righteousness and, at times, morality

Set during the small window of time when President Lincoln was attempting all manner of strong-arming congressmen -- lame duck and otherwise -- to pass a Constitutional amendment to end slavery, Day-Lewis' Lincoln was a bit full of himself, a blowhard if you will who liked to spin a yarn regardless of whether you wanted to hear it. He was also depicted as someone who was willing to use federal appointments and governmental favors as tools to achieve the larger good of liberating people from enslavement even if it meant that the Civil War went on longer.

For all the dirty underbelly of the horse-trading that goes on behind the scenes, Lincoln was humane and focused. As movie-goers observed the lengths the president had to go to force the 13th Amendment to passage so it could ultimately be ratified by the states, one could only hope that our current leaders have such noble aspirations in mind when they are forced to squabble in the mud over things like fiscal cliffs and debt ceilings.

The New York Times' David Brooks wrote an excellent column about the film, in which he said:

"The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way. It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others -- if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.

. . . The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning. [Steven] Spielberg's Lincoln gets this point. The hero has a high moral vision, but he also has the courage to take morally hazardous action in order to make that vision a reality."

It's a must-see for anyone who longs to look at an American politician, albeit one played by a man born across the pond in a film, and feel proud.

How To Be A Woman

I devoured British newspaper columnist Caitlin Moran's best-selling, profane, butt-kicking feminist tome How To Be A Woman in a handful of days over the Christmas break. It was thought provoking, funny and fearless. Mostly, it was fearless and in-your-face. That's what I liked the most about Moran's musings as she heaped self-deprecating humor into the mix while saucily taking on issues like the asinine grooming habits of modern women, sex, sexism, porn, women in pop culture, cosmetic surgery and motherhood.

It is a breezy read that is not for the faint of heart, or those who take umbrage at profanity, say, like the Dowager Countess for example. Lady Sybil, however, would likely have gotten a big kick out of reading it.

Image credit: Amazon.

Random Good Reads/Views: Women in Media, ‘Homeland’ Finale, What’s Eating the Grinch?

Joanne Bamberger, aka Pundit Mom, clued me in to this provocative and eye-opening speech by Megan Kamerick, a former president of the Journalism & Women Symposium, about how women’s voices are disproportionately absent from news stories and features, despite the fact that women constitute over half of the population.

“Stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters,” Kamerick said.

“Women are more likely to be defined by their body parts,” she said, showing a cover image of Wired Magazine of a woman’s naked chest, noting that women rarely appear on the cover of Wired unless they're sexualized.

Image credit: Showtime

On that Homeland Finale

*Warning spoilers from Homeland finale*

Homeland showrunners told New York Magazine’s Vulture that they originally anticipated that Sgt. Nick Brody would only appear in the first season.

“I think when Alex [Gansa, his co-showrunner] and I first conceived the series, it seemed obvious that we couldn’t take the show with Brody as a character beyond the first season. But then we realized how rich that mine was and how much more there was left to get out of it,” Howard Gordon, the other Homeland showrunner, told New York.

“Brody’s surviving the finale was very much in doubt,” Gansa said. “We really talked about it both ways. Ultimately we felt there was more to tell in the saga between Carrie and Brody, in that relationship.”

Now there are some who thought the finale was a cop-out and they didn’t like it in the least. I was surprised at the abruptness of its tonal shift when Brody attempted to blow himself up, only to have his explosive vest malfunction. He fixed it, was ready to try again, but hearing his daughter’s pleading voice on his cell phone (prompted to call him by Carrie Mathison) persuaded him to go another way and later rationalize to Abu Nazir that he could do more damage by working within the system rather than just killing the folks in that bunker.

I admit I was a bit let down when the credits rolled on this finale. Then I slept on it. Why was I let down, because Brody DIDN’T kill people? I didn’t want him to kill people. I didn’t want to see the glorification of a suicide bomber. When I woke up the next morning and thought about what the Homeland writers had done – turning a would-be lethal protest into something more subtle in the form of working within the system – I decided that the writers took the harder and more intriguing road. In the world of 24, things were always blowing up, even nuclear bombs. Sure, seeing a bomb go off is dramatic, but seeing people wrestle with their conscience, with right and wrong, with loyalties and with consequences is so much more interesting.

Later in the New York interview, Gansa, who noted that Brody’s suicide video is still missing, added:

“[Brody] flipped the switch, which satisfied our feeling that this is someone who would go through with what he decided to do, and then it opened up the possibility of redemption after the fact, when he fixes the vest and almost goes through with it for the second time. We all like Brody now, and we want him to be redeemed, and we kind of got to have it both ways.”

What’s Eating The Grinch?

In honor of the Christmas season, I’m going to direct you to an essay in McSweeney’s by Robb Fritz which dissected what was really bugging that mean old Grinch and discussed how the green being used his happy-go-lucky dog Max as his “put-upon canine slave, made to dress up as an unconvincing reindeer with one heavy faux-antler roped onto his head.”

“There’s no indication that the Grinch, unlike Scrooge, is a wealthy, malevolent, card carrying member of the 1%,” Fritz wrote. “He’s more just a finicky grump who hates it when his downstairs neighbors have late night parties, ostensibly because the noise keeps him up, but maybe just possibly because he hasn’t been invited.”

Image credit: Showtime.