Imagine Tony Blair stripped of that wolfish gleam of self-interest, inflated with 20 or 30 brisk strokes of a bicycle pump, squeezed into a tweed hunting jacket, and then sent out into the world with a fixed frown of genteel incomprehension. Bonneville has fine comic instincts (he was tremendous, for instance, in Notting Hill), and for the role of Robert he has cultivated a strange, plodding denseness and deliberateness, as if the earl is contending with a minor brain injury. In a sense, there is something wrong with Robert’s brain: his pomposity is so complete, it is almost a state of innocence.
I would have to say such a description is pretty accurate. I recommend the article for another take on this royal family that has mesmerized America. Not to say the negative opinions are difficult to find. I provide a few more comments below.
-- Simon Schama writing in The Daily Beast:
Nothing beats British television drama for servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia. So the series is fabulously frocked, and acted, and overacted, and hyper-overacted by all the Usual Suspects in keeping with their allotted roles.
-- Benedict Cumberbatch quoted in Reader's Digest:
“We’re remembering that there was a world before the First World War. We’re living in a culture now that’s revering, or having a nostalgia trip with, the beginning of the 1900s. Although Downton traded a lot on the sentiment in the last series…but we won’t talk about that series because it was, in my opinion, f*****g atrocious.”
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