Downton Abbey/YMMV

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• Colbert Bump: Featured in two Penny Arcade comics. And now we wait.
  • Also featured in Xkcd here, though one can only speculate what kind of effect that will have on viewership.
  • Saturday Night Live's surprisingly accurate summary of the show: "There's a MILF and a dad and they've got three daughters named Hot (Mary), Way Hot (Sybil), and The Other One (Edith). And they all hang out with this old lady that looks like a chicken. We hated her at first, but then we got high and she made us crack up! [...] There's also a whole bunch of tuxedo people who live in the basement and their lives suck! Get this: They always have to stand up at the same time. Their names are: Nice Guy (Bates), Mean Guy (Thomas), Mouse Girl (Daisy), and Super Bitch (O'Brien)."
• Draco in Leather Pants: Thomas is this for a proportion of the fanbase.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: John Bates. And chauffeur Tom Branson, who has a surprisingly large place in the fandom considering that he showed up halfway through the first series and was never considered a regular character. But probably the most popular character is the Dowager Countess, for being one of the all-time champion Deadpan Snarkers.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Mr Carson and Mrs Hughes, who according to Word of God have no romantic interest in each other but who are shipped voraciously by a significant segment of the fandom anyway.
• Foe Yay: Thomas and William.
• Fridge Logic: How exactly did the prosecutors know specifically which servants had been eavesdropping on Mr. Bates?
  • The prosecutor mentioned Mr. Bates gave reports to police. It's unlikely he'd have been anything other than honest and thorough. He likely mentioned that Mrs. Hughes and Miss O'Brien knew things about the situation.
  • Handing them that information, though, does seem to have put Bates into Too Dumb to Live territory-almost literally.
• Girls Need Role Models: Sybil and Gwen. Whilst Mary and Edith partake in the The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry, Anna pines hopelessly after Mr Bates, and Daisy is relentlessly manipulated by Thomas, it comes as a relief to watch Sybil and Gwen form an inter-class friendship based on Gwen's desire to become a typist and Sybil's interest in women's emancipation.
• Hollywood Homely: Though not a dark beauty like her sisters, Edith really is rather lovely in her own way. The way the family talks, though, you'd think her face would send would-be suitors running for the hills.
• Kick the Dog: Mary's brutal passive-aggressive mockery of Sir Anthony at the garden party. While Edith definitely deserved to be taken down a peg, her suitor did not, and it verges on What the Hell, Hero? level cruelty.
• Les Yay: Sybil and Gwen.
  • Cora and O'Brien as well.
  • YMMV, but Mary and Lavinia share what seems almost like a Romantic Two-Girl Friendship, despite the fact they are both in love with Matthew.
• Magnificent Bitch: The Dowager Countess.
• Moral Event Horizon: Some fans consider O'Brien to have crossed this by deliberately causing Cora to slip and lose her unborn baby. She did seem remorseful about it, however.
  • Though oddly enough, it's also the only one of her many evil actions that she had an identifiable motive for.
• Pet the Dog:
  • When the Countess sees a bereft valet (made to feel useless because of his employer's insistence on doing things by himself) and asks him to take her cup.
  • When Thomas dances with Daisy, just because she expresses a wish to learn. Even O'Brien smiles.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Edith learning to drive and looking after convalescing soldiers in series two leads her to become kinder and less concerned with marriage and one-upping Mary.
• The Scrappy: Thomas and O'Brien.
• Squick: Bates' ill-advised use of a "limp corrector."
• Tear Jerker: Holy smokes, episode seven. When Robert was crying over the dead baby. And then war breaks out and he has to announce it to everyone.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Shows up consistently in general fan response to the second season. Some elements of the series are altered drastically with the advent of World War I, although a great deal remains the same, which, in turn, has spawned an outcry from other portions of the fandom, who protest that the narrative glosses over or speeds by too many major global events to be considered realistic. An unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect of setting a drama series during a time of extreme social and political upheaval.
• Unfortunate Implications: All over episode three with the perceptions of Pamuk and his dealings with Mary. Sex by coercion is still rape.
  • Likewise, the way that all the characters who aren't immediately content with a life of servitude (Thomas, O'Brien, Ethel) are portrayed as evil, villainous or stupid betrays a great deal of class anxiety on the part of the writers. (Well, except Gwen, but her ambitions were rather less grand than the other examples.)
    • A definite YMMV, as it could also be seen as Gwen wanting upward mobility, setting reasonable goals, and working hard to make it happen and succeeding, while those are discontent but either just become bitter (O'Brien), try to use underhanded schemes bordering on the criminal to get ahead (Thomas), or expect success and fame to be handed to them just because ( Ethel) all fail and sometimes only make their situations worse.
  • Not to mention the fact that the only reoccurring gay character on the entire show is portrayed consistently as an asshole who deserves a miserable life, and every time he's made an advance at a man thus far, he's been treated with disgust, which betrays a fair amount of homophobia. Oh, and the one-episode gay and/or bisexual character wasn't exactly a prize either.
    • Homophobia towards him is unfortunately valid, as expected for the period, that's Deliberate Values Dissonance. The rest is up for debate.
    • There's also the fact that the two characters the show has to being regular villains (Thomas and O'Brien) are the heaviest smokers on-screen. And they do their best scheming while smoking outside,
• Wheelchair Woobie: Matthew, but he gets better.
• The Woobie: Bates especially, but almost all of the characters get a turn in this role