Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic“Downton Abbey: A New Era” is bookended by a wedding and a funeral. In between, a good deal happens: Babies are born and paternities questioned, long-simmering romances clinched and fresh ones set to bloom; an excursion takes a fraction of the family to France while a film crew keeps the rest of them busy back home.
It all adds up to rather more than audiences of 2019’s standalone “Downton Abbey” feature must have expected, if only because the earlier film seemed conspicuously uninterested in starting anything new.That’s the trouble with television — from a film critic’s perspective, at least.
Movies are by their nature story-obsessed — plot-driven locomotives, compelled by conflict, engineered to reach a tidy resolution of some kind within two hours or so.
On TV, on the other hand, once a small-screen world has been established, it’s designed to remain open-ended from episode to episode and season to season, obliging audiences to tune in for updates so long as it stays on air, before being unceremoniously canceled without closure.
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