It’s a premise that might sound familiar: Intrigue and scandal in a grand British house with slippery servants underfoot, and the navigating of social mores that could spell disaster for glittering members of the upper class. Belgravia, the new series from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, shares some DNA with his other hits—from Downton and The English Game, currently airing on Netflix, to movies like Gosford Park and 2004’s Vanity Fair—but is decidedly a creation all its own.
The series, which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m. EST on EPIX, follows two London families—the established Earl and Countess of Brockenhurst (she’s played by T&C favorite Harriet Walter) and the up-and-coming Trenchards—as a long-buried secret unravels and threatens to ruin them both. It’s a delicious drama chock full of double-crossing, social warfare, and the kind of underhanded tactics that were as prevalent in 1800s Britain as they are in any feud worth noting today.
Would you expect anything less from Fellowes? Not only did he write the novel that the series is based on, but he’s proven himself time and time again to be a modern master of the period drama and one of our most deft writers when it comes to portraying grand people behaving like animals. Here, the writer talks to T&C about creating the series, the inherent glamour of tragedy, and just when we might see that Downton Abbey sequel.
You’ve written Belgravia twice, once as a novel and once for television. How were the experiences different?
Originally, I was approached by an editor who’d had success with novels of mine. They felt, partly on the back of Downton, that another novel might go over well. Gareth Neame, who I work with on Downton, read the book and decided he would buy it.
It was a first for me to be adapting my own work. I’ve adapted books before for television, film, and theater, but never my own work. I did find it quite interesting that you have to forget you wrote it—when a bit seems boring or too long and in need of cuts, you need to forget you were the original author and come at it with a new sword.
We know the real place Belgravia inspired you. Are your characters also based on history or are they entirely fictional?
It was completely made up! When I did make it up, though, I realized I needed a time jump of about 25 years. So, I thought it would be fun to start it with the Duchess of Richmond’s famous ball, which took place [in 1815] just before the Battle of Waterloo. I had always been interested in that night but became even more so when I wrote an adaptation of Vanity Fair for Reese Witherspoon, so I did even more research. It’s an iconic, tragic moment.
Tragedy is usually some kind of mixture of magnificence and unhappiness; it isn’t enough for someone to be killed in the road by a milk float, you need a queen to be decapitated in a revolution to get that kind of romantic tragedy.
And that ball always struck me as having a bit of alchemy: these young men were in their dress uniforms dancing with their fiancées and then were suddenly called to arms, so that many of them were still in those uniforms when they died. Going from that kind of great privilege to ruin is so vivid and terrible that it’s always burned an image into my brain.
The series has moments that fans of your other work will recognize. How similar is it to something like Downton Abbey for you?
I think it’s darker than Downton. The servants are working people; they’re doing their jobs because those are the jobs that were available. It’s not sentimental. In the country, people tended to work for families for many years and live in cottages on their estate, but that wasn’t true in London. The average time in 1880 for a footman to remain in a London house was 18 months. It’s a sharper world.
There are plot twists, like death in childbirth, that happen in both.
You can’t deal with any civilization much before the 1930s without death in childbirth being a fairy common occurrence. Everyone knew someone it had happened to. As the years went on, it became less dangerous. The condition Sybil died of in Downton became not safe but survivable, but only in the 1930s. Before then it was fatal 100 percent of the time.
Grand Central Publishing Julian Fellowes's Belgravia
Grand Central Publishing Julian Fellowes's Belgravia
This is a six-episode series—whereas Downton aired for six seasons and spawned a film. What makes one story a better fit for its length than the other?
Sometimes you’re dealing with a linear, single narrative, and that doesn’t really have the potential for the soap-like quality of an ongoing series, when you have all the time to take an interest in a new set of characters. You go rolling on with it indefinitely until the audience has had enough. With a single story, there’s no need for a sequel. You’re not thinking in terms of a second chapter, because the thing is finished and done.
Speaking of sequels, how far along is the next Downton movie?
I’ve got different plates in the air now—[the upcoming series] The Gilded Age was in preproduction but is closed down right now by the coronavirus—but I am working on the script. Trollope said you can only do three hours of work a day, that’s how long your concentration is best.
Adam Rathe is Town & Country's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects.
