I have to admit I’ve never watched much Downton Abbey: what I have seen makes it look like it’s just a period ITV soap opera in which posh people are the saviours of the poor working class people who toil for them.
But it’s very big right, particularly in the US. Part of the charm is that the English accents make it seem like a very ‘classy’* show. Now Steven Colbert’s got Michelle Dockery, Hugh Bonneville and Allen Leech to try to do a scene of the show with American accents, to see if losing the accents affects the US viewer’s perception.
It basically all sounds as badly written as I suspected, but how about you, American readers? Does it reduce Downton‘s classiness to hear it in a variety of US accents?
I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
