1. Downton Abbey is a pretty classy joint, but it would be even classier if they installed one of those motorized stairway lifts for Professor Mcgonagall.
2. The formal dining experience for post-Edwardian aristocrats is so inspirational! Next week I am going to dine on my microwaved frozen chicken tikka masala from a brass-plated TV tray.
3. This show is popular for the same reason that guy with bad teeth and the British accent takes home a different girl from the bar every night.
4. I was sure there would be at least one nun.
5. The men keep alluding to financial difficulties. You want to save a few bob each week so you don't have to fire your val-et (whatever that is)? STOP BUYING SO MANY TUXEDOS, YOU ASSHOLES.
6. Seriously guys: garage sale.
7. I would like this show a lot more if they hired Sean Astin to play one of the gardeners, wearing full hobbit regalia and talking in the same accent he used in Lord of the Rings. Sean Astin is the son of Patty Duke, which really makes him Hollywood royalty, after all.
8. Somewhere, someone in Grosse Pointe is masturbating to this dinner scene right now.
9. The Masterpiece Theater people must have blown their entire music budget on hats. They have one sound effect. Maybe for Season Four they can buy fewer hats and hire Coolio to do all the music.
10. I'll bet if William the Conqueror and his knights could have foreseen that the British nobility would end up like this they would have committed seppuku on the battlefield at Hastings.
11. I wonder how much urine is in that turtle soup.
12. Great, they're playing cricket. Because after forty-five minutes of listening to these people talk I wasn't bewildered enough trying to follow the complex unwritten ordinances of the post-WWI British social hierarchy---I really needed a breezy depiction of a formal sporting contest with inscrutable rules played by overdressed butlers to help convince me I'm being entertained.
13. I wish Honey Boo Boo was on tonight.