"Downton Abbey" and "Mrs. Miniver"

Like other anglophiles who spent a few years in England and understands the heroic significance of World War II (Dunkirk, blackouts, Hail Brittania! pomp, circumstance, and the bulldog at Ten Downing Street!) to the English sensibility, I am a sucker for period dramas that English TV wizards put together for delighted consumption on both sides of the pond. I enjoyed the inaugural season of "Downton Abbey" on PBS last winter and, knowing that the second season played to even greater acclaim in London, look forward to its arrival in the States starting in a week or two. The last episode of season one left us in a garden party interrupted by a telegram announcing that "we" are now at war with Germany. The arc of the first season has taken us from the Titanic to the guns of August, and we're ready now for the endless war to end all wars. All well and good, but BUT and it's a big but please, I beg of the fates, do not allow the producers to do anything as cheap as they did in season number one when they shamelessly lifted a great scene from Mrs. Miniver, the 1942 movie starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon that won the year's best-picture Oscar. When Maggie Smith as the dowager garciously, and against her own egocentric impulses, gives the award for best locally-produced rose to a commoner, she is repeating Dame May Whitty's gesture at a climactic instant of Mrs. Miniver. It was the cheapest act of unacknowledged plagiarism that I have seen in many a day . . . unless they plan to make such acts of theft a recurrent feature of the feature, in which case I guess we can chalk it up to postmodernism in action. In any case, here's the theater trailer for Mrs. Miniver, which you should see. -- DL