Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith Crawley in Downton Abbey Photo: IC

 

Gareth Neame Photo: IC

The global success of Downton Abbey is vivid proof that romance and drama are alive and well and thriving on the small screen, its executive producer said Tuesday.

In a telephone interview from London, two days after season four of the post-Edwardian soap opera premiered on US public TV, Gareth Neame said he remains surprised at the series' huge worldwide following.

"Because of the different ways that we can consume media, audiences around the world have much more varied diets," Neame told AFP, referring to such innovations as mass-produced DVDs, on-demand video and Internet downloads.

"Their palate is more mature, and they are prepared to look at stories - comedies as well as drama - wherever they come from."

Set in the 1910s and 1920s, Downton Abbey dwells on the insular lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants at their grand country house in Yorkshire at a time of momentous change in Britain.

Created and written by Julian Fellowes, it's made by Carnival Films, the independent production house that Neame founded and still runs after its sale in 2008 to US TV giant NBC Universal. The series has been sold to 250 territories - "that's about every territory," Neame said - with ITV, Britain's main commercial TV broadcaster and PBS in the US as the core markets.

"It suggests to me that while the world we're depicting is very specific and very nuanced - very unlike the way anyone lives today - there is a universal aspect to the characters that everyone in the world relates to," he said.

For a long time, he added, it had been "deeply unfashionable ... to do anything about romance on TV," not least in the US.

"We've really seen drama come back to become what I believe to be the dominant genre on TV," Neame said.

"With a few notable exceptions every year in the cinema, drama is alive and well and living on TV - and it's as alive and well as it has ever been."

Downton Abbey was first telecast in 2010 in Britain, and Neame never expected it would pull more than 6 million diehard fans of English period drama in its home market - let alone a cult-like following stateside.

Sunday's season premiere on commercial-free PBS attracted 10.2 million viewers, the biggest audience for any Downton Abbey episode in the US, according to Nielsen ratings data.

In Britain where it airs Sunday nights in the autumn, Neame said the show typically comes in at about 12 million, representing a "phenomenal" 40 percent audience share.

But Neame is also surprised it has gone down well in Asia and in European countries that have not historically embraced British TV drama.

"Why we should be the most popular­ non-Spanish program in Spain, I don't know," he said.