[This piece assumes you’ve seen the first four seasons of Downton Abbey. As to the fifth, it avoids specific spoilers, but does talk about themes and threads enough that you might be 20 percent less surprised by a couple of developments. It’s the best balance I could strike.]
Let us get this out of the way right off: Particularly after its first two seasons, Downton Abbey has been enormously uneven. It’s satisfying in some moments, dull in others, and always prone to falling so in love with a particular story beat that it cannot move past it.
The season premiering in the U.S. on PBS on Sunday (and yes, lots of people still watch it on plain old television, and suggestions to the contrary say more about the limited social circle of the speaker than they do about technology) isn’t free of the repetition problem. We still find Edith in a state of angst, we still find Bates and Anna suffering nobly in the shadow of suspicion about something they didn’t do, and perhaps more interestingly, we find the widowed Mary Crawley echoing her first-season self more than ever: The selfish and insensitive edge that her relationship with Matthew smoothed down seems to have returned.
At the same time, there is a theme to the season, and it’s more than “rich people and poor people under one roof” (though that’s still present) and more than “change, change, change!” (though that’s still present, too). Specifically, this is a season heavily interested in the choices — particularly the love lives and sex lives — of women of all ages and classes.
We have already seen the single Edith burdened by guilt because she became pregnant, to the point where she wound up in a scheme to place her daughter for adoption, but only halfway, neither able to live with the adoption nor able to acknowledge the child. But now, we will see the flip side, as another single woman considers whether sex before marriage is an integral part of determining compatibility — and how to avoid pregnancy as a consequence. We will see how partially evolved attitudes allow some men to want sex, have sex, and then look down on the women they have it with for having it with them. And we will continue to see, as we did last season, that while sexual violence has little to do with sexual feelings, a social failure to separate the two makes for victims of violence who bear their considerable burdens alone.