Watched a few episodes of Downton Abbey today. It's been around for quite awhile now, but I've watched perhaps half of it, jumping around, out of sequence, between seasons/series... lots of melodrama, but entertaining.
I notice that Brit period dramas tend to focus on the upstairs/downstairs dynamics a lot... It'd be interesting to see a drama about the middle classes at some point. Not that they were entirely missing from Downton. They weren't the focus, though.
When I think about the middle class characters on Downton, they all had surprise story arcs that had wealth more or less land in their laps.
Matthew Crawley finds wealth through Downton. Tom Branson starts out a socialist, and winds up a well-to-do auto entrepreneur married to an heiress. Gwen doesn't end up wealthy, but does well enough, marrying a successful guy she meets through an office job.
Thomas the scrappy survivor jumps past middle class to a Beverly Hills poolside... well played.
My research explores the eroticization of Tudor queens in a range of popular genres, from #earlymodern letters and plays, to tv and #fanfiction today. I also consider the affordances and limitations of color-conscious #casting in #perioddrama.