Tag: Downton Abbey

Hotel Portofino–A Pleasant Stay?

Written by Diana Paul on October 13, 2024. Posted in Television reviews. No Comments on Hotel Portofino–A Pleasant Stay?

In this three-season British historical drama, Hotel Portofino, Bella Ainsworth (Natasha McElhone), the beautiful middle-aged daughter of a wealthy manufacturer of fabrics, moves to Italy in the 1920s to fulfill her dream of having a luxury boutique hotel in the resort town of Portofino. Problem is that Mussolini is on the verge of seizing power in Italy and destroying what she has built. On a personal level, Bella’s ne’er-do-well womanizing husband, Cecil (Mark Umbers), is sabotaging her efforts to create a life of her own. Alice Mays-Smith (Olivia Morris), Bella and Cecil’s daughter,...

“Belgravia”– Downton Abbey REDUX

Written by Diana Paul on September 7, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 1 Comment on “Belgravia”– Downton Abbey REDUX

Belgravia, based on “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes’ 2016 novel of the same name, opens two days before the Battle of Waterloo at an aristocratic ball. Two London families—the Earl (Tom Wilkinson) and Countess of Brockenhurst (Harriet Walter) and the up-and-coming merchants, Anne (Tamsin Greig) and Philip Trenchard (Philip Glenister), are uncomfortable in their brief interactions. There are insurmountable class differences and if that were not enough, the romance between the Brockenhursts’ son and...

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Written by diana on September 17, 2018. Posted in movie reviews. 1 Comment on The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a Netflix historical drama based on the 2008 historical best-selling novel of the same name by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Set on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, a year after the end of the Second World War, we see Julie Ashton (the talented Lily James –Lady Rose in “Downton Abbey”), a London author writing under a male pen name. She yearns for a writing project in her own voice. Ashton gets a letter from Dawsey Adams, a Guernsey pig farmer, who has a used book with her name and address. Exchanging...

The House of Eliott –Fashion Haute Couture

Written by diana on September 30, 2015. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 2 Comments on The House of Eliott –Fashion Haute Couture

House of Eliott This BBC television series broadcast between 1991 and 1994 is a sleeper, dramatizing feminism immediately after the First World War. A consistent theme throughout “The House of Eliott” is the struggle of women in the 1920s to live fulfilling and independent lives. Created by Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, who had previously devised “Upstairs, Downstairs,” this is a period drama focused on the same era as “Downton Abbey”. Two sisters, Evangeline and Beatrice Eliott establish a fashion house designing haute couture after they are forced to be on their own...

“Parade’s End”–An Historian’s Downton Abbey?”

Written by diana on March 5, 2013. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound. 3 Comments on “Parade’s End”–An Historian’s Downton Abbey?”

The five-part BBC/HBO miniseries “Parade’s End” premiered on HBO last week (February 26) and is also available on video-on-demand. The playwright Tom Stoppard has adapted Ford Madox Ford’s monumental 900 page, four-novel series “Parade’s End” for television: the intellectual’s Edwardian-era alternative to “Downton Abbey.” Both series take place in the same time period, beginning with the decade before the First World War. But the view of the British class system, the end of the Empire, and the attitude towards the war could not be more...