Instant Entertainment: A Tale Of Two Upstairs/Downstairs Dramas
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<br/>Fans of upstairs/downstairs dramas have high- and low-brow takes on the form waiting for them on Netflix Watch Instantly right now. Both boast British accents and class concerns in a large house, carefully choreographed set pieces, deaths disguised and their consequences, token gays and loads of intricate intrigues inside and out. One is a PBS costume drama with ladies and maids in a giant manor in pre-World War I England and the other is a softcore Starz sand-and-sandals soap set in a Roman gladiator school. One has Maggie Smith, the other has Lucy Lawless. And depending on what you are in the mood for both, both <em>Downton Abbey</em> and <em>Spartacus: Gods of the Arena</em> are welcome ways to waste a weekend.<br/><br/>Also? There is <em>The Sandlot</em>
<br/> Unless costume dramas are your thing a seven-hour series about a British Earl, his American wife, their three daughters and the servants who take care of them and their manor can be a hard sell. But give <em>Downton Abbey</em> about thirty minutes and you'll see, something just clicks. The show, from creator Julian Fellowes (who also wrote <em>Gosford Park</em>), gleefully toys with and embraces the well-worn tropes of its genre from the old "somebody's poisoned the soup" riff to an unabashedly evil scheming footman. And then it wraps it all up in a gorgeous setting (<a href="http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/">available for weddings</a>!) with gorgeous clothes and the kind of dinner party porn that would make Martha Stewart pant.<br/><br/>The story revolves around Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), the Earl of Grentham, whose father made him permanently tie the rights to his family's manor (the titular Abbey) with his title when he married an American woman, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), for her money. When his cousins, the heirs to his title, die on the Titanic at the start of the series a new heir apparent, a lowly solicitor named Matthew (Dan Stevens), arrives on the scene, with his progressive mother Isobel (Penelope Wilton) in tow, to learn the ways of the manor. In no time flat Cora and her mother-in-law the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) are plotting to fix things so that, title or no, the manor can be passed on to the Countess's oldest daughter, Edith (Laura Carmichael), instead. <br/><br/>Got all that? Good, because at the <em>same time</em> there is a mutiny afoot amongst the staff of the abbey, where the previously mentioned footman (Rob James-Collier) and the Countess's lady's maid (Siobhan Finneran) are plotting against the Earl's mysterious new valet (Brendan Coyle) <em>and</em> the manor's housekeeper (Phyllis Logan) and butler (Jim Carter). Oh, yeah, and the cook has a terrible secret (Lesley Nicol), the chauffeur (Allen Leech) is a socialist and might be in love with the family's youngest daughter, the suffragist Mary (Michelle Dockery), one of the maids (Rose Leslie) wants to leave service to be a secretary and one of the guests at the manor isn't being totally honest about his reason for visiting. And that's only the beginning. <br/><br/>It sounds like a lot, but the show is so well crafted, and the performances are so lovingly given, you won't even notice you've just lost seven hours staring at your computer (or TV, depending on your setup).
<br/>The second season of <em>Spartacus</em>âtechnically a prequel to <em>Spartacus: Blood and Sand</em> that doesn't actually include Spartacus (the series was quickly put together when the star of the first season, Andy Whitfield, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma)âoffers wildly different pleasures than <em>Downton</em>. Instead of servants in suits and dresses there are slaves in sheets and diapers, boobies and bare abs that are nearly as big are constantly flying about and not an episode goes by without a good old fashioned, extremely graphic, slow-motion slaughtering. Meanwhile, Lucy Lawless and John Hannah give such fabulously hungry performances as the wicked masters of the house that despite all of the eye candy and violence we quickly found we were actually watching for them more than anything else (if you've watched the first season you'll know exactly what we mean). This is not a subtle show, but sometimes you want to watch a bunch of essentially-cartoon guys slaughter each other with various weapons (<em>Buffy</em> would blush at some of the things they do with stakes) and sometimes you want to watch a morality play on why you shouldn't host a masked sex orgy with your virgin slave girls. For those times it is really hard to top the <em>Arena</em>.<br/><br/>The plot of <em>Gods of the Arena</em> is not nearly as complicated as that of <em>Downton</em>. Batiatus (Hannah) and his wife Lucretia (Lawless) run a third-rate gladiator shop while Batiatus's controlling father is out of town for health reasons. The pair are desperate to have their gladiators appear in the opening fight in a new arena and will do anything (and we mean <em>anything</em>) to see it so. Meanwhile, there is a whole lot of other less interesting stuff going on with the slaves and gladiators downstairs.<br/><br/>Just to be clear, while there is quite a lot of sex and violence in this one (as we said, it's a softcore Starz show) it is incredibly cartoonish. If you enjoyed the aesthetic of <em>300</em> you'll feel right at home. The thing is, while all of that stuff is fun and certainly a draw for the show's audience, its the performances from Lawless and Hannah that really suck you in. This is more the <em>Battlestar</em> Lawless than the <em>Xena</em> Lawlessâbut with even less clothingâand she's never been better. Curling her lips around every word of faux-old English dialogue, she's mesmerizing. And John Hannah, who was new to us when the first show premiered last year, is just excellent. His character is no Al Swearengen but Hannah acts like he might as well be his great-great-great-great-grandfather and runs with it. The glee with which he chews through the most absurdly corny scenes is palpable. And now that his run time in Roman times is done we truly hope we'll be seeing more of him.<br/><br/><em>Spartacus</em> is not for everyone (children especially) and if you are looking for something remotely historically accurate you'll be better served with a not-on-Netflix classic like <em>I, Claudius</em> or even <em>Rome</em>. It is not "great television," it won't teach you anything and you'll definitely feel a bit embarrassed if you tell your friends you've watched it (or, y'know, told the Internet) but it <em>is</em> a surprisingly fun six hours.
<br/>Not really in the mood for an miniseries? For shorter, less droll and/or graphic entertainments you might want to check out <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/">Contact</a></em> or <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108037/">The Sandlot</a></em>. The former, a Jodie Foster/Matthew McConaughy take on the Carl Sagen classic, leaves Netflix's shores on March 8 while the latter, in which a bunch of kids play baseball, departs on March 7.