arts & life

Members of the
tribe are being
introduced at
Downton Abbey.

Jewish
Gent

Michael Fox

Special to the Jewish News

ewish characters have
finally joined the
impeccably attired
throng at Downton Abbey, and it's
not an altogether happy day.
Season 5 of
While Lord and Lady Grantham
welcome the new arrivals with
Downton Abbey is
exquisite manners and the per-
fectly calibrated amount of modest
currently airing
warmth, series creator and writer
Julian Fellowes is a good deal less
Sundays on PBS.
hospitable. Fellowes has devised
a nuclear family of cardboard
Check local listings
cutouts that fit unflattering Jewish
stereotypes and generate viewer
for details.
antipathy.
Before we rush to judgment or
leap to conclusions, however, we
should allow for the possibility that
the uncompliment-
ary presentation of
the Aldridge family
in Season 5 is merely
a teaser for Season 6
(and beyond, given
the series' extraor-
dinary popularity in
the colonies). It's not
a stretch to imagine
Fellowes using the
The original cast of Downton Abbey

Celebrity Jews

Nate Bloom

Special to the Jewish News

TV TAKES

New this week: Starting on
Thursday, Feb.12, on NBC
(8 p.m.), the eight-part mini-
series The Slap is based on a
hit Australian novel and TV
series of the same name. NBC is
clearly trying to compete with
HBO with this prestige series:
Lisa Cholodenko, 50 (The Kids
are All Right), who got a Golden
Globe nomination for HBO's
Olive Kitteridge, is the principal
director and Jon Robin Baitz,
53, a respected playwright and
the creator of TV's Brothers and

42

February 12 •

Sisters, wrote the pilot. The title
refers to what develops when
a man slaps a child (not his) at
a suburban barbecue. Co-stars
include Peter Sarsgaard (Maggie
Gyllenhaal's husband) and Uma
Thurman (whose non-Jewish
maternal grandfather fled Nazi
Germany rather than betray his
Jewish business partner).
Comedian Brett Gelman, 38,
who co-stars
with Detroit-
raised Judy
Greer in the FX
series Married,
co-wrote and
co-stars in a
new special
Gelman
for the "Adult

Hebrew hunk Atticus Aldridge (Matt Barber) makes his entrance this season.

Aldridges as a means of exposing
and examining British anti-Semi-
tism as Downtown Abbey rolls into
the late 1920s and early 1930s.
As every Downton fan knows,
PBS' hit Masterpiece series has
long featured a character with
Jewish ancestry. Lady Grantham,
aka Lady Cora Crawley (Elizabeth
McGovern), is the American-
born daughter of the late Isidore
Levinson. Cora is Episcopalian, like
her mother, but she doesn't view
Jews as "the other; needless to say.
Spoiler alert: Lord Grantham's
niece, Lady Rose MacClare, doesn't
see Jews as different, either. That
is, not when they're as hunky as
Atticus Aldridge, a square-jawed
banker's son who chivalrously shel-
ters Rose with his umbrella in one
of the least-inspired meet-cutes in
the annals of television.
One could trace Rose's open-
mindedness to last season's col-
orblind liaison with a black jazz
singer, and her naive modernity to
her fight with Lord Grantham over
bringing a wireless into the sacred
realm of Downton Abbey.
But the sometimes-shy Atticus
(played by Matt Barber) is so
assimilated and so devoid of per-

sonality that he wouldn't register
as Jewish if he didn't tell us. In
other words, Rose is smitten with
an Englishmen of her status and
breeding, and whose Jewishness is
incidental rather than fundamen-
tal.
In fact, the moment when he
confides that he's descended from
Jews who left Odessa after particu-
larly brutal pogroms doesn't belong
to him but to his listeners — bitter,
broke Russian expatriates of the
pre-Revolution regime who insult
Atticus over their shoulders as they
walk away.
Now Atticus is of the right class
and has parents of means, and
those are the credentials that mat-
ter in Downton's rarefied world.
But his perpetually unsmiling
father, Lord Sinderby, is less san-
guine about his son's involvement
with a "shiksa," and the utterance of
the epithet stamps him as intoler-
ant and cinches our dislike.
There are certainly valid argu-
ments against intermarriage, and
Fellowes could have written an
impassioned monologue for Lord
Sinderby that expressed the costs
and worth of Jewish identity, and
the weight and meaning of tradi-

tions and rituals. Instead, Lord
Sinderby has a couple of angry
lines that leave the impression that
he prizes money and influence
above all else.
While much is made of Lord
Sinderby's family values, namely
his hatred of divorce, it's presented
as evidence of his inflexibility and
anachronism rather than allegiance
to vows and moral behavior. As for
Lady Sinderby, she is completely
gracious and agreeable, but in an
unwaveringly superficial way.
To keep things in perspective,
Downton Abbey is an upstairs/
downstairs soap opera that is
generally more concerned with
the romantic complications of its
female characters (Lady Rose, in
particular) than with the big pic-
ture of class-conscious Britain.
I find the series most interest-
ing, though, when it invokes and
reflects the changes in British soci-
ety after World War I (and evokes
contemporary parallels). Julian
Fellowes has introduced a story arc
that's tailor-made for illuminating
anti-Semitism between the wars.
On those grounds, I'm already
anticipating Season 6.

Swim" corner of the Cartoon
Network. Titled Dinner with
Family with Brett Gelman and
Brett Gelman's Family, it will
premiere on Friday, Feb.13, at
12:30 a.m. (DVR it!). This live-
action special, which will prob-
ably have a lot of Jewish con-
tent, co-stars Patti LuPone as
his mother and Tony Roberts,
75, as his dad. Roberts has had
big roles in several Woody Allen
films.
Premiering on Thursday, Feb.
19, on CBS is a new version of
The Odd Couple, the famous
1965 stage show authored by
Neil Simon, now 87. The show
stars Matthew Perry (Friends)
as Oscar, a slovenly sports

writer, and Thomas Lennon as
Felix, a neat-freak photographer.
As you probably know, they are
old friends and when Felix's wife
leaves him, he moves in with
long-divorced Oscar. Lindsay
Sloane, 37,
plays Emily,
a resident
of Oscar's
building who
attracts the
romantic
attention
Sloane
of the guys.
Sloane, who
has been appearing as a TV
guest star or series regular
since she was a teen, was a
co-star of the short-lived WB

series, Grosse Pointe. You may
recall that Pointe was a satirical
parody of Beverly Hills, 90210,
in which we see the back scenes
of a 90210 rip-off series that is
set in Grosse Pointe, Mich. (but
filmed in Los Angeles). Sloane
played the Jewish character
Marcy Sternfeld, who was a
parody of the character Tori
Spelling, now 41, played on
90210.

❑

SPORTS NOTE

Omitted from a recent list of
Jews playing in the NHL was
Eric Nystrom, 31, a Nashville
Predators left-wing. Nystrom
played four years for the
University of Michigan. ❑

