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The Kitchen Table

Masterpiece Theater

11 years ago

I'm about half way through watching the new season of Upstairs Downstairs on MP. I love it. I liked Downtown Abby but still think this is so much better. It's really edgy this season....abortion, lesbians!!! Maybe it's because I grew up with Upstaairs Downstairs back in the 70's but this is really great television.

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Comments (7)

sylviatexas1
11 years ago
I love it!
maire_cate
11 years ago
I'm enjoying it too. Tonight's the final episode of Season 2 and I'll miss it when it's over. And Downtown Abby doesn't air here in the States until Jan.
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Miss Austen Regrets was on TV last night. As always the settings of country mansions, parkland etc were beautiful and Olivia Williams as JA was good but . . . I found it difficult to follow the 'plot', such as it was, and was confused by all the young men Jane flirted with. At 40 years old she was well over middle age by the standards of those days and my, didn't she hit the bottle. I understand that her sister burnt most of her letters and I'm sure Jane would have never started so many sentences with "Oh my God!" Very modern. btw the actress, Phyllida Law, who played JA's mother is 'in real life' the mother of Emma Thompsom.
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Yeah, but I doubt LMA thought so. As Emory mentioned, she was brought up in a state of semi-starvation a lot of the time, with the family living on the produce of their apple trees and the occasional loaf of graham bread. There was a very prevalent belief in that group that whiteness = purity, so the lighter anything was, the better it was. That applied to people, too. A blue-eyed blonde was innately spiritually superior to a brown-eyed one, a dark-haired person with blue eyes would be the next step down in temptation to be bad, and so on. Poor LMA was the dark-haired, dark-eyed kid, so Bronson used to do things like putting this always-very-hungry child in a room with an apple on the table, telling her that only a very wicked child would eat it without permission, and then leaving the two of them (the apple and LMA) alone together all day. Of course, starvation would eventually win out and then the rest of the family would return to mourn over her ineradicably evil and selfish nature. There were other weird manifestations of this in their circle, too. Sophia Peabody, the sister of one of Bronson's teaching assistants (and eventually Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne), was practically incapacitated as a girl by terrible headaches, which I suspect had something to do with the fact that her mother kept her (an already semi-pure blue-eyed blonde) on a diet of only white foods: white sugar, white flour, milk, and occasionally white meat chicken, those being the purest and therefore the best foods. At any rate, LMA certainly appreciated the sacrifice of the luxurious Christmas breakfast in the book in a way few other people ever could.
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Lol, I know the newer stuff can be confusing, but you can really save a lot of money. Absolutely you should have your own modem, renting your modem and router is kind of like in the old days when you could "rent" your home telephone from the telephone company. You'll waste a lot of money on it. If your son is somewhat tech savvy and could help you get it set up and configured, I would really consider a Chromecast. It connects to the back of your TV And works over Wi-Fi. This is what my TV looks like when I'm not casting anything to it. Various background images, along with current time and weather. Then I can go to any device (or computer) and select a video. In this case, I've opened YouTube on my phone and I'm playing the music video for Happy. I click on the cast icon that I'm pointing at here, Select the device I want to cast to And the video will be "casted" onto the television. We watch most everything this way. It also allows me to cast my own photos and videos so if I want to show my friends/family the latest video of my kids being goofy, we don't have to crowd around my phone, I can just cast it to the television. Hope this helps. It's really worth it in my opinion. The Chromecast costs less than 50 bucks and there is no recurring fee for it.
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chisue
11 years ago
At least here in Chicagoland, PBS will reprise Downton Abbey in December and begin the newer episodes in January.

IMO "Call the Midwife" is superior to both the Abbey and Up/Down. We'll get a 'special' of Midwife here on December 30, but I don't know if there is a sequel.
sylviatexas1
11 years ago
I love Midwife, too!

I laughed outloud when Chummy finally stood up to her "Mater" (mother) & told her that her wedding would be at the local or village church, her reception would be catered by the nuns, & she was going to wear a suit instead of a wedding dress.

"Well, at least let it be white" begged her mother.

& Chummy said, in her perfect upper clahs accent,
"Sorry, no longer entitled".
dedtired
11 years ago
I adored the original Up/Down back in the 70's. After doing the dishes on a Sunday evening, I'd close myself in my bedroom to watch it before putting the kids to bed.

Midwife was such a treat and I was sorry to see the season come to an end. My local PBS keeps begging for money to bring us season two. I think I will send a donation.

I have to go back to the beginning of the new Up/Down and catch up.
sheilajoyce_gw
11 years ago
I do love them all. My sister clued me into the Bomb Girls on REELZ, but out cable does not carry that station. It is about the girls who work in a bomb plant during WWII. Luckily, my daughter gets it and records it, so I do get to see a lot of the shows, though out of order it seems. DD came to the show late, and she picks up repeats when she can.
chisue
11 years ago
My DH returned from our library with Series One of "Waterloo Road" -- a 1996 BBC production about teachers in a troubled high school that will be shut down unless academic performance can be improved. The blurb says,"Welcome to Waterloo Road, where every day is an education." After watching only the first episode, I'm not sure the teachers are much more emotionally mature than the kids!

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