Downton Abbey: A New Era hit the spot! The swell of music, a wedding, I was swept into fandom from the start, at times teary, at other times swooning, and laughing out
loud. Writer Julian Fellowes, brilliant at creating romance, never forgets the real estate. Downton is a place, a grand house where The Granthams, now family to me and millions of followers, have arrived at modernity, a delicious lapse between the two wars, and just before the Depression. Happy endings abound as the family braces itself for a surprise or two. Granny, the Dowager Countess—the always remarkable Maggie Smith—has inherited a villa in Toulon, in the South of France, from a former lover, allowing some of the Granthams to head to the beach to check out the joint, yet another palatial home. That leaves Downton to be managed by Lady Mary, the stern, lovely Michelle Dockery, as a film crew arrives at the dawn of talkies. Yes, it’s a little Singin’ in the Rain, turning a story we love into a larger story we love.

Only a grand premiere will do, an opera house for the grandest soap opera of the last decade: Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera was fitted with a movie screen for the occasion followed by a grand dinner at Tavern on the Green, allowing Fellowes to hold court in the garden. The head of two events, he was greeted by the casts of not only the Downton movie, but HBO’s The Gilded Age, a thematically related series of New York wealth and class–featuring the fine mansions along Madison. Dockery, Laura Carmichael, Elizabeth McGovern, Hugh Dancy with his wife Claire Danes, Christine Baranski, Debra Monk, Louisa Jacobson (her mom is Meryl Streep), all stopped by his table.

Celebrating Downton’s return to the big screen, Hugh Dancy as Downton’s film-within-the-film’s director Jack Barber makes his feelings for Lady Mary known; she, of course, married with her husband absent, behaves, reluctantly, and fantasizes the prospect of two handsome men fighting for her favors. Now in the Tavern-on-the-Green garden, Dancy riffed on the possibilities of his character’s revenge, calling Mary out as a slut– in the grand tradition of her grandmaman. Laughing at a party recalling the grandeur of pre-pandemic events, imagining alternative dialogues, we were swept away: it all felt as far from real as soap operas get, and as happy a time as Fellowes’ Downton Abbey.