"Upstairs, Downstairs" Reveals Television's Decline

The servants and aristocrats are back on the Public Television System. This time Jean Marsh is the head of an agency providing servants to the rich nobility. Also this time the series is only three hours long as opposed to over twenty episodes when the series "Upstairs, Downstairs" was watched by millions of people in the 1970s. Back in the late sixties and through the seventies I often organized my Sundays to be certain that I could sit in front of my new color television to watch the PBS's Masterpiece Theater and I still do. But something has changed. The acting is good, the scenery is beautiful, the story line remains interesting, but Masterpiece Theater is not the same as it was thirty years ago. That is probably true of many things, and television entertainment should not be an exception. Nevertheless, Sunday nights sparkled when the highly skilled British actors filled the television screen with sometimes deeply profound stories of the nineteenth century, the world wars, and the culture of empire.

Since there has been only one episode of the new "Upstairs, Downstairs," I am reserving judgment on it. I will say that Jean Marsh reminds me how old I have gotten. Probably if I ran into high school classmates they too would remind me of my age. Thirty years ago many things were better, including me. But the new series of servants and aristocrats reflect change that had taken place in England after World War I; change I largely regret. So, change regardless of culture, seems inevitable. Change is especially inevitable after cataclysmic events such as the Great War.

Not only had the Great War (WWI) changed British society the social structure further declined as a result of the Great Depression. Working class people lived desperate lives and did not hold the aristocracy in as much awe as they had in previous times. I think we have seen similar changes in our own social structure. The changes in Western Culture have come as the result of not only the Great War, and the Great Depression, but also from World War II and the euphoric decade that followed, the cultural disillusionment of the 1960s, and finally from the breakdown in social mores that has followed. Television reflects those changes and breakdowns and PBS is not immune.

I have just about given up on television as a source of information and entertainment. I still have a television set but use it mainly to watch movies and the old Masterpiece Theater series I loved so much. Today we see burly men shouting at one another over disputes with logs, motorcycles, and fishing trawlers. Then there is the unscripted (I use that word advisedly) reality (I use that word advisedly also) shows. The worst of these is Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice." This is likely the most scripted of the unscripted reality shows. Further, the people vieing for Trump's favor are near celebrities. I have to be reminded who some of them are and what they do. A few are interesting , but they are easy targets of the loud and crude who dominate the show.

The mostly junk passing as news is depressing. I do not care much about a starlet caught stealing and has a drug problem or the actor who tears up New York City hotel rooms but I cannot escape them. Most
that sort of news used to be confined to magazines that had titles like
"Hollywood Confidential." Sometimes I turn to the British
Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) news program that shows up on PBS, but it comes on too early in the afternoon where I am. The PBS News Hour is dull and lingers too long on Washington. We need to know what is going on in the world, but our provincial attitudes keep us too close to home. The majority of senators and representatives in Washington have so little to contribute at an intelligent level it is difficult to listen to them talk about anything.

Local news on television is even worse. Murder and mayhem are the headlines. Out of the million or more people who live in the area served by the local television stations there have been twenty or more homicides but to listen to the breathless news reporters every night I could be led to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, are being killed daily. The way the local news is presented makes it scarier than rebellion in the Middle East, but unlike rebellion in the Middle East that news has less impact on me. I feel sorry for the victims of murder and mayhem and I worry about the quality of life in the big city, but those events do not affect my life like the rise in gasoline prices.

Television stinks! That is my unequivocal evaluation. I wish television people exerted more energy to produce meaningful drama and good comedy. However, I know that is not going to happen. Their bottom line (to use a cliché) means doing things cheaply and that every eight minutes five or more commercials interrupt the stinky programming. So, it is back to movies on DVDs.

Still, "Upstairs, Downstairs" does hold my interest and "Mystery" still calls me back to PBS, and occasionally something on the History Channel or Discovery makes me sit and watch, but by and large a good book is better.