Free Republic

Downton Abbey just finished its six-season run two months ago, but if you have been fiending for British accents, period costumes, poorly managed hereditary estates, class tensions, love stories revolving around a young woman named Mary, and the nostalgic eye of Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, here comes Julian Fellowes Presents Doctor Thorne. The miniseries, adapted from an Anthony Trollope novel, arrives on Amazon on Friday, having aired earlier this year in the U.K. under the simple title Doctor Thorne. For its move to America, the show has put on airs. These airs reflect Amazon’s ambitions, ones that will perhaps...

(1875, a novel by Anthony Trollope, a multi-part series on PBS)There are worse things than a lie...I have found...that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.-- Doctor Wortle's School, chapter 6, Trollope, 1858Russell Baker, former New York Times writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, hosting Exxon-Mobil Masterpiece Theatre's dramatic narrative of the Anthony Trollope novel, is either the stupidest man available to public television, or as masterful a fraud as the central character in the story. Baker, at the end of the third episode, found the ignorance or brass to face the...