“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...