Started watching this, am predictably enthralled in the romance, to some degree. (It’s the turn-of-the-century Mad Men with better dialogue, right?) Makes me wonder whether the same thing is true/truthy of “service/servant films” as is true of “war films” — namely that the film form tends toward glamorization of the most problematic social aspects of it. Even when I know they’re trying to activate my own contemporary values and sense of ambiguity around the short-term value versus long-term fucked-up-edness of the crumbling British service system (“sure the system is bad, but if you got rid of it right now then all of these people would be out of work and they take pride in their work and what’s wrong with taking pride in your work anyway?”), it still feels paternalistic and conservative.

Makes me think that someone should (has anyone?) do a show about how the American service industries currently work. Would be interesting to profile low- and middle-income service workers and how they interact (or fail to interact) with the families they serve.

EDIT: To be clear, the “dialogue” comment was a jab at Mad Men, not praise of DA. And yeah, there’s something to it being the “TV Adele!” (Except Adele would be a lot better if there were more soap opera plotlines.)