Downton Abbey: Season 3

Through three seasons, the structure of Downton Abbey's long game is pretty easy to break down. Season 1 focused on aristocratic British people before World War I, and laid out a pretty clear image of the way things were, and had been for decades, dating back to the Victorian Era if not earlier. Season 2 introduced the war, and along with the body count it brought, the changes it forced. Women were doing more with all the men gone, the nobility's standards were growing a little more lax due to the shortage of help and money, and new technology was enabling both the servants and their masters to accomplish more with less effort. All of these things hinted at the coming of a new world order after the war, which brings us to Season 3. From a socio-political standpoint, it may have been the strongest season of Downton yet. You had the old guard - Robert and Carson, namely - getting bent out of shape over all sorts of new ideologies shared by the women and the young men. In their eyes, the end of the war would enable a return to normalcy; in everyone else's, the war had ushered in a whole new era. These contrasting belief sets were front and center all season long and they affected all kinds of important events at Downton, making for some wonderful undertones of tension and conflict throughout the season.

But this was also easily the most overdramatic season of Downton yet, offering up more death and tragedy than Season 2, which had included World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. Some of it was genuinely moving television, but too much of wasn't. Between visits from an American grandmother and a feisty teenage cousin from Scotland, a love quadrilateral of sorts among the kitchen maids and footmen, and the tremendously boring - spoiler alert - Bates in prison arc, I just don't get the sense that Season 3 advanced an overall story nearly as much as either of the previous two installments. Downton Abbey was as fun and soapy as ever in Season 3, and its thematic message about class reform was at its strongest, so in no way was this a bad season of television. It just felt so much more inconsequential, except when it was birthing heirs or killing off main characters.