Downton Abbey Overdose

OK, it's all your fault -- my friends in the computer!!

You kept tweeting  (it's not twittering, right? that would be the actually birds, no? ;) about Downton Abbey to the point that you made me want to check it out! The laundry is to blame too, because after feeling so efficient I wanted to reward myself with something fun and... well... frivolous. ;)

Oh, and I'll go ahead and blame it on Time Magazine's article too (from last week) that featured the real house and its actual owners (and how they need to rent out their estate for filming in order to maintain the house since they don't have much money). It definitely made me curious.

So on Monday night, after I loaded the washer for the fifth & last time, I went to look for it and figured out that the first season was available for viewing online on PBS.org (note: it's not anymore, more on that in a minute). I watched the first episode (because I had to get ready to teach the next morning) and liked it. The problem is that I didn't realize that all of season one was only available until last night (1/17).

I needed to prepare classes for today last night, but I ended up caving in and watching episodes 2, 3 and part of 4 until 3 am! -- just because I knew they were going to "disappear" from the website (which they did). That was silly of me because they're available for streaming on Netflix -- that's how I watched the end of episode four (which is 7 in Netflix -- different number of episodes there from pbs).

The "bad" thing was that when I stopped viewing it and finally went to bed (midway through last episode of the season), I thought it was going really well, but tonight, after watching the end of the episode, I didn't like it quite as much.

The truth is... I realized years ago, that I don't really like TV or cinema, I like literature, so... I generally like book adaptations much better than original scripts (even when I haven't read the original! it seems I can "recognize" it's a literary work even without knowing sometimes). The latter seem shallow and contrived to me and that's precisely how I felt about Downton Abbey  this evening...

I will continue watching, though (online, we have no cable or tv that picks up the air signals). These things are addictive, unfortunately. Mindless entertainment (which I don't care much for, but... isn't literature that too? Well... yes, but it's more of an art than made-for-TV things, right. Right?!!

Anyone else out there watching?