While I’m currently obsessed with The Gilded Age’s Season 3 – the writing is SO good this season – I will still make time for the proto-Gilded Age, Downton Abbey. Between the actual television series and the neverending parade of post-show movies, I am not surprised that people have actually lost the plot of the Crawleys’ lives. The only one I really care about is Tom Branson (Allen Leech), the Irishman who marries the only cool Crawley daughter, Lady Sybil, then decides to raise their daughter at Downton after Sybil’s death. Tom talks sense into princesses and romances socialists, suffragettes and a lady’s maid (who turned out to be an actual lady). He eventually remarried and seems quite happy.
I bring up Tom because, at some point in the Downton world, he goes into business with Lady Mary’s second husband Henry Talbot and they basically own a car dealership, and Henry also races cars, a convenient excuse for why Matthew Goode never seems to find time in his schedule to show up for the movies. Well, now they’ve got a scandalous new reason for Henry’s absence: Lady Mary and Henry have gotten a DIVORCE! In England in the 1930s. This is the big scandal at the heart of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale:
As you can see, they also bring back Paul Giamatti, who must be doing this for sh-ts and giggles at this point, because I can’t imagine the money is that good. He returns as Cora’s brother Harold Levinson. This would be… Great Depression-era, correct? The tagline is that it’s set as the family “enters the 1930s,” and the stock market crashed in 1929. So yeah, lines up. I guess they’re going to have to sell Downton, and that’s the “grand finale.” They can’t kill off any more people and get surprise windfall inheritances. I also have to say – they made Lady Mary into a black widow, so I’m shocked that her second husband got out of the marriage alive. Hm. And Alessandro Nivola is her love interest in this?? I’ve never understood why men go gaga for Mary, honestly – she’s so haughty and priggish. Anyway, I’ll be watching… whenever it comes out on streaming/rental.
Screengrabs courtesy of the trailer.
