Well, they really didn't need to do that. I thought the two-part 'Death Comes to Pemberley' should have been an adequate fix to tide the desperate over until the real deal gets here.
The time setting is 100 years earlier than Downton, but you really can't tell by the house. Or the grounds. In this case, Pemberley manor. There are no phones of course, no motor cars and no electricity, no toasters or typewriters. But there are many over-dressed people whose clothes make them so stiff they seem to have trouble sitting down. The evil international threat is Napoleon, whose name gets dropped once. But no maps roll out, and there doesn't seem to be a globe in sight.
No, this is a murder mystery, based on the novel by P.D. James, who uses the characters from Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' and takes them out a little further in time and surrounds them with a murder in the woods, on the grounds, and therefore, potentially quite scandalous to the family.
I will admit, I never got through even the Illustrated Classics comic book version of 'Pride and Prejudice', or Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights.' No matter. You don't need to the steeped in knowing anything about this era, or the characters to enjoy 'Death Comes to Pemberley.'
Anna Maxwell Martin as Lizzie is once again the ever clever foil who solves everything and gets in the most polite of zingers, especially when she's talking to a woman with a big hat. The bigger the hat, the bigger the biddy, I always say. She repeats the type of role she played in 'Bletchley Circle' and South Riding'. She's great.
Matthew Rhys plays Mr. Darcy, her husband, and for reasons I don't really know, keeps getting called 'Darcy', rather than by his first name, Fitzwilliam. In the hit series 'The Americans', Mr. Rhys of course is Philip Jennings, the 1980s married KGB father planted in the Virginia suburbs, who, with his wife, Elizabeth, fight the Cold War, Russian-style by acting like Americans while raising kids, shopping and doing laundry and listening to coded messages in the cellar. They are a tough pair to come across.
In 'The Americans', Philip, Mr. Rhys is the Red. In 'Death Comes to Pemberley', as Mr. Darcy, he is surrounded a bit by British officers in red uniforms. My guess is Mr. Rhys feels right at home with this.
As Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rhys can go back to his natural British accent, but of course has to endure the clothes of the early 1800s. As of course does his wife Lizzie. So of course when the required love scene is filmed, no one has shed anything, (unbutton, yes) lest too much time be spent getting undressed and out of the mood. It still works, however. Remember, no four hour warning back then.
But of course the real star of the show is the house and the grounds. The grand house of Pemberley is the actual Chatsworth House. So, the Downton crowd gets its fix on the splendor of these homes. The film crew must have been in a prolonged state of ecstasy when filming. There are some truly nicely framed shots.
In fact, if there are those who paid any attention to the recently run Breeders' Cup run at Santa Anita over the weekend, they might have caught the piece on Highclare Thoroughbred Racing. Highclare, the actual mansion used to shoot 'Downton Abbey' is in real-life, among other things, the site of a thoroughbred training facility. Highclare Thoroughbreds had the Irish-bred Telescope entered in the $3 million Breeders' Cup turf race at a mile and a half. A premier event. And a premier horse.
The horse's sire is the champion Galileo, so the name Telescope more than fits. Thus, NBC felt the need to give us a bit of tour of Highclare, and insert some 'Downton' scenes. If watched, it might have even further eased the withdrawal pain for those smitten with Downton-itis.
Unfortunately, for me and other backers of Telescope, he didn't see everything coming, and was beaten by another good horse Main Sequence, as he finished fourth, beaten by two and a quarter lengths, in what was a typical turf bang-bang finish. Enough of that.
The death at Pemberley is a murder in the woods, occurring when two chaps burst out of a carriage, one in a red uniform, and the other in the finest flummery the wardrobe people could find. Two go into the woods, and one is coshed to death. But who did the coshing?
Thus, we get CSI 1800s-style, and inquest and court room proceedings full of conflict of interests and blatant leading-type questioning that is allowed to keep going by a judge who wants to get out of the ridiculous clothes he's wearing and grab a whiskey. And that wig!
No spoiler alert needed. It can be difficult at first to distinguish who's who because of the clothes and hairstyles. Then there are the re-la-tion-ships. Whose sister is that? But there aren't that many characters, so even I, with the help of close captioning and some DVR replay, was able to fully know who's who.
There is of course an unwed mother and the question of who the father is, but this of course adds to the story, and more than you might think at first. There is the required tour through the kitchen by Lizzie, the lady of the house to inspect the food preparations that are underway for the upcoming gala.
There are curtsying kitchen maids, and the cook's tour. Lizzie lefts the lid on 'white soup' and says it smells delicious. And then there are the 'almond faggots.' The delicacies abound. A Wendy's wrapper is nowhere in sight.
If you give any logical thought to the events as the denouement is reveled, you wonder what kind training the British were giving their soldiers and especially their officers. They lack hand-to-hand martial arts skills, and seem to get easily lost in the underbrush. No wonder we won.
Never mind. The two-part mini-series will soothe the Downton bunch. And if they still need more, dig up the replay of the Breeders' Cup, 9th Race at Santa Anita on Saturday. I bet you can pick the winner now.
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