Love/Hate

Costume Dramas Are My Problematic Fave

Is there something subversive beneath all that good taste and Chantilly lace?

The interior of Highclere Castle as seen on the popular series “Downton Abbey.” Photo by Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

Growing up in England in the 1980s and ’90s instilled in me a Pavlovian reaction to the scene of a horse-drawn carriage crunching up the gravel driveway of a stately home, scored to a rousing string orchestra. Even before my mother had time to identify the house in question, before the protagonists had descended into the circle of uniformed flunkies, and before Judy Dench or Helena Bonham Carter or Emma Thompson had exchanged a word with Anthony Hopkins or Daniel Day-Lewis or some lesser Redgrave, I was primed and eager to sink into a warm bath of romance, heartbreak, gossip, snobbery, cut-glass vowels, and clinking cutlery.

At the same time, I wanted to resist the lure of the bonnets and the ballrooms. For a bookish child, costume drama was like that well-read friend with one too many Jane Austen tote bags — it was faintly embarrassing, skipping over the nuance and the difficulty of the literature and going straight for the commercial jugular. Romantic comedy without the courage of its convictions, the genre’s image was stuffy, middlebrow, jingoistic — and perhaps worst of all, catnip to Americans. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s British critics resented the Oscars for caring only…