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Breaking the Arm of Coincidence 2/21/2013 12:17:22 PM
The third season of Downton Abbey stretches credulity to the breaking point with too much drama., Breaking the Long Arm of Coincidence
If you felt a shock wave this past weekend, it was probably not from a meteor but from the breaking of the long arm of coincidence. Indeed, the arm was smashed to smithereens, and the perp was not Hollywood but a British import show called Downton Abbey.
The author and producers of the show seem to have decided to play God and decree that any character with the effrontery to fall in love must encounter disaster. There was the pitiful housemaid whose lover died in the First World War, leaving her pregnant and forced to become a prostitute in order to support her child. There was Sybil, in love with Tom yet dying in childbirth. And Edith, abandoned at the altar by the older man she’d fallen in love with, then given a renewed promise of happiness with her editor only to learn that he is hopelessly bound for life to a mad woman. There was Anna and Bates, in love yet separated for years when he is wrongly accused and sent to prison. There was even a gay lover forced to endure humiliation and the threatened loss of his job for tentatively kissing the wrong person. And now, the principals. We are asked to believe that, after years back-and-forth, together and not together, the main characters, Mary and Matthew, having finally arrived at certainty about their love and even produced a child together, must be separated forever by the death of Matthew in what appears to be a senseless accident.
Oops. They went too far that time. My ability to believe in and follow the story line just flew out the window. Up to now I went along, albeit with growing doubts. People die in wartime, people are wrongly imprisoned, men flee the altar, and society has always discriminated against gays. Regrettably, it happens. But not all of those things occur in a small group of people. I began to feel that too much was happening.
We read and believe in fiction because of something called the willing suspension of disbelief. It’s up to the author or playwright to make the material sufficiently believable that suspension kicks in automatically. In the beginning, Downton Abbey succeeded admirably in this. It ranked as one of the most popular TV shows in America. Season Two wasn’t quite so riveting, and Three fell off a bit more, but even so, I stayed with it until now.
I once had a student who, writing a novel about Chicago, insisted on placing his heroine’s family home on the exact spot where Buckingham Fountain is located. I told him he could not do that. He responded, “I can place the house anywhere I want. I can place it on Mars if I choose. I’m writing fiction.” I tried to explain about the willing suspension of disbelief. “Your characters and events can be fictional, but if your setting and story line don’t seem real, no one will believe the story or want to read it.” He couldn’t seem to take that in; he persisted. Needless to say, you won’t find his book available on Amazon. It remains a manuscript in his desk drawer.
Too bad the creators of Downton opted, at the very end of the season, in the last scene of the last sequence, to break the arm of coincidence. It compromises so much of what went before, and for me at least, it destroyed that fragile suspension of disbelief.
