'Downton Abbey': 8 stories from the set

The British TV period drama has captured the imagination of many worldwide. What is it like to play a member of the upper-class Crawley family or one of their servants? In 'Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey,' writer Emma Rowley takes an insider's look at the hit show. Here's some of what she found.

Nick Briggs/PBS/AP
'Downton Abbey' stars Laura Carmichael (r.).

1. Not all happy rich and miserable poor

Nick Briggs/PBS/AP

"Downton" creator Julian Fellowes says that, when crafting the world of "Downton," he wanted to avoid portraying the world at that time as wonderful for the aristocrats and terrible for the lower classes, a view he believes oversimplifies things. "For me, the contention that everything was horrible for everyone except a few unpleasant aristocrats is as untrue as saying everything was marvelous for absolutely everyone," he said. "The truth, as always, lies somewhere between the two.... I think that that sense of ordinary, non-heroic characters nevertheless being decent people who are trying to do their best is the central philosophy of 'Downton.'"

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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