Downton Abbey

By various evidences, It was almost obvious by many reasons that these were the first few scenes in the first episode.

They managed to give a clear introduction to all the characters and made it clear to who might be the protagonist.

In the first scene we they revealed a good 3 seconds of the “noddy shot” which showed the footmen reacting to his Mistress’s bell with his sarcastic-sounding response “And they’re off” which implied that this was their regular routine as servants for Lady Mary and her family.

Mrs. Patmore is shown to be in charge of the estate’s food and what confirmed the fact that this family was insanely wealthy is because in that time (1890-1910’s) even for a middle class family to have a maid I would assume the family to be quite privileged, so here we clearly have a very high profile and wealthy (upper class) family as they have a long line of servants, butlers and maids.

It’s proven itself to be interesting since there are so many things you might have not discovered prior to watching this episode, for instance when they were ironing the newspaper you wondered why they might have done that. The series had your question answered in the next 5 seconds and now it has your trust.

Their characters' portrayal here is quite clear, let’s start with Lady Mary.

Lady Mary sports a well groomed hair-style with light make-up almost at all times. The setting of her bedroom is shown to be well-organised and has a beautiful view and a lot of shots that featured her are mostly low-angle shots which in my opinion accompanied her smart and tall body-posture really well, clearly she is one the powerful/dominant character.

The servants are addressed by their nicknames instead of Lady or Sir which represented their status as a worker.

They also showed a reference to Titanic which happened to be in the newspaper and that’s how I knew the point in time they were in, a lot of the sounds that accompany the scenes are ambient sounds. The editing technique that was use very frequently was the basic “cut” where the shot just ends and starts at another scene, with “sound bridge” accompanying.

Here you see Lord Grantham and his three daughters with Lady Mary being the dominant one because she sits closest to the head of the table next to their fathers, the second daughter Lady Edith seemed like the most serious and dramatic so I’d imagine she’d have to be part of a huge plot at some point and our last one Lady Sybil (the youngest one) has shown the most curiosity about the news of the Titanic so I assumed she’d be the most adventurous one out of the three