The Cazalets

I feel that sometimes it is easy to lose yourself in searching for mistakes within a costume piece rather then simply watching it for the story. The story of the cazalets was brilliant, I was hooked from start to finish. The casting was perfect and i felt that we were able to become familiar with the characters to the point where we began to really care for them

The new PBS series "The Cazalets" is billed as a latter day "Upstairs Downstairs." It isn't. The characters are far less finely formed and the first episode was a back to back (well, front to front) series of graphic sexual couplings. Set in England on the eve of WW2, it appears that nobody in the British Isles did anything in 37 and 38 other than bonk each other. Marital sex. Extra marital sex. Violent sex. Lesbian sex. Even incest. And this was only episode one! What can we expect in coming weeks? Kinky sex? SM sex? Bestiality? Really! This is not the mandate of either PBS or BBC. There are x-rated channels for such voyeurism.

The first episode also has some glaring errors. The word "flak" is used twice. A German acronym for "fliegerabwehrkanonen" or "anti aircraft guns", it entered the language only in the early years of the war and would have been in no-one's vocabulary in 37 and 38.

The first episode also shows the servants gathered around a small radio listening to Neville Chamberlain's address. Small radios were rare in 1938 and they certainly were not in plastic cases. There also appear to be no antenna or ground wires, essential elements of the receivers of the period. I spotted these two errors because they fall within my knowledge. How many others might there also have been?

It's an interesting snapshot of an interesting period of history. But like most snapshots, it was done without much thought or artistry.

This started off slow, then picked a bit in the middle, but the last episode just fizzled out altogether.

The storylines, such as they were, were just left hanging with no conclusions to any of them.

So, all rather pointless.

At least, compared with 2022, there were not profanities. A pleasant change.

Cazalets is a sensitive portrait of complicated people. The fact that all the main characters belong to the same wealthy family makes their portrayed individuality even more unique. Historically there are some minor blurbs. But love, jealousy, sex, suffering, sorrow, death are unique to all times. Money and name cannot insulate us from the human condition, as the movie thoughtfully expounds. Five Stars !!!!! in my estimation.

The show was slow, but enjoyable, but absolutely no ending. It was almost like they just stopped writing, and that was that.