One-quarter of English estates changed hands between 1918 and 1921. On the face of such change, Downton Abbey’s having endured this long with the same family was an accomplishment in itself. Such are the sad and fascinating facts on offer in John Martin Robinson’s Felling the Ancient Oaks: How England Lost its Great Country Estates, a lavish and handsome account of 21 estates lost to the ravages of time, and denied the chance even for a second life in BBC exterior shots. Mary Grantham predicted, of nearby estates, “they will fall, lots of them.” How correct she was.

The afflictions of the English estate did not begin with World War I. The Great War was, in many regards, a final shove delivered to an already-tottering institution, which was still a high society talisman and attractive to the nouveau riche like Robert Carlisle, but infrequently self-sustaining. The traditional agricultural foundations of these great estates, which drew their income from rents, had been under steady assault from cheaper, foreign, and especially American imports for decades. Thus all the greater irony that Downton required another American import, Cora Grantham, in order to keep the estate running. (Another New York heiress sustained one of the estates mentioned in the book, Cassiobury, in precisely the same fashion.) George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical, set in 1832, already signals the difficulties ahead:

Meanwhile the fortune that was getting larger in the imagination of constituents was shrinking a little in the imagination of its owner. It was hardly more than a hundred and fifty thousand; and there were not only the heavy mortgages to be paid off, but also a large amount of capital was needed in order to repair the farm-buildings all over the estate, to carry out extensive draining, and make allowances to incoming tenants, which might remove the difficulty of newly letting the farms in a time of agricultural depression. The farms actually tenanted were held by men who had begged hard to succeed their fathers in getting a little poorer every year, on land which was also getting poorer, where the highest rate of increase was in the arrears of rent.

Shirley MacLaine had a few facts to go on when she accepted the part of Marjorie Nugent in Richard Linklater’s latest film, Bernie: It is based on a true story. Nugent was mean and nasty. She was a widow hated by most of the town of Carthage, Texas. She was rich and stingy.  She was murdered by her friend, the town mortician named Bernie Tiede.

Everything else was up to MacLaine to figure out. At first she said she hoped Linklater would give her more clues. But he was “ambiguous.”

“The first meeting was strange because he didn’t answer any of my questions,” said the 78-year-old Oscar winning actress. “I said, ‘Do you want me to look like her? What is the wardrobe like? Do I speak in that accent?’ I had to find my own way about everything. All of us were operating on our own.”

Patton Oswalt obsessively live tweets it from his weekly viewing parties. Katy Perry is using it to distract herself from her marital woes. Roger Ebert has stepped outside the movie realm to praise it in his blog. Saturday Night Live spoofed it. Mob Wives star Big Ang Raiola recited favorite quips for Us Weekly. The Onion equated watching one episode with reading a book. And Wednesday night The Soup will celebrate it with a special parody starring RuPaul and drag queens Raven and Shangela.

Could all of this fuss really be about a PBS show? Quite right. Masterpiece's Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning hit, Downton Abbey, created by Julian Fellowes, a TV ratings success and cultural phenomenon, has catapulted the public-television broadcaster with the stodgy reputation to the cool kids' table.

“We don’t know how to handle that over here,” said Mel Rogers, CEO and president of PBS SoCal, the PBS member station that serves greater Los Angeles. "We got accidentally popular.”

There are many things wrong with the Republic in 2012, but when historians come to write its chronicle they will notice that the country was gripped by the clammy delirium of nostalgia. Tea Partiers ache for what they imagine to have been a tricorny country, all innocent of the Monster Government. Politicians and radio ranters sell the credulous on an American paradise before “socialism,” in the wicked shape of Social Security and Medicare, ever came to be. And folks who might have better ways to pass their time have been falling like grouse to the gun before the mighty edifice of Downton Abbey. Deprived of a wallow in the dry-martini and bullet-bra world of Mad Men? Not to worry, Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery. It’s a servile soap opera that an American public desperate for something, anything, to take its mind off the perplexities of the present seems only too happy to down in great, grateful gulps.

Yes, I know it’s perfect in its way. Nothing beats British television drama for servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia. So the series is fabulously frocked, and acted, and overacted, and hyper-overacted by all the Usual Suspects in keeping with their allotted roles. There’s Carson, the beetle-browed butler. (My favorite in the endless parade of butlerian clichés was Rabbits, the butler in H. G. Wells’s hymn of hate to the lordly house, Tono-Bungay.) Maggie Smith does her tungsten-corseted, eye-rolling, nostril-curling, glottal-gurgle as only she can—half Lady Bracknell, half Queen Mary (the unfailingly erect consort of King George V). Julian Fellowes has gotten this stuff down pat since writing Gosford Park, though all the main plot lines were anticipated a long time ago by Upstairs, Downstairs.

But this unassuageable American craving for the British country house is bound to get on my nerves, having grown up in the 1950s and ’60s with a Jacobinical rage against the moth-eaten haughtiness of the toffs. They still knew how to put One in One’s Place. I’d barely crossed the threshold of one such establishment before its Carson had delicately knocked at the door of my room wondering when he could collect my trousers. He had not asked of course but assumed I’d want them Properly Pressed. I still remember the look on his face as he carried them off between thumb and forefinger as if removing a mysterious object in an advanced form of contaminated decay. Before “retiring,” I was asked by another servant whether I would prefer to be woken with tea or coffee. “Ah,” I said, “how nice. Tea if that’s all right.” “Milk or lemon?” he pressed on. “Oh, gosh, thanks, milk.” “The Jersey or the Guernsey herd, sir?”

Highclere House is one of the great British stately homes, familiar to the wider Anglophile world as the location for the British TV drama Downton Abbey.

Now its current chatelaine, Lady Fiona, the Countess of Carnarvon, has penned an account of Almina Carnarvon, the enormously wealthy heiress and illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, who, in 1895, married the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, the explorer who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.

Despite the fact that Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle contains no references to Downton Abbey beyond its sales-friendly title, it is a fascinating insight into how the seriously rich once lived.

Among the millions of British viewers who settled down to watch the sixth episode of the BBC costume drama Downton Abbey’s second series on Sunday night were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who have told one of the show’s stars they are “huge fans” of the program.

The news of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s taste in television comes from Jessica Brown Findlay, the 22-year-old brunette who plays the kind-hearted aristocrat turned war nurse Lady Sybil in the U.K. hit, the best thing for the English nobility’s image overseas since Brideshead Revisited. When the actress met the royal couple at a Los Angeles event organized by the British film and TV awards body, BAFTA, they confided that they are addicted to writer Julian Fellowes’s portrayal of life upstairs and downstairs at a fictional British “Big House” in the early 1900s, Findlay told the British edition of OK! magazine.

“I was flattered and privileged to be presented to the two of them at the BAFTA event in Los Angeles,” Findlay said. “They picked me out and spoke very highly of Downton Abbey, and it was lovely to hear. They told me they were huge fans of the show … It felt surreal as an actress playing English aristocracy to meet them in L.A.”

Few could have anticipated the fever that critically acclaimed British costume drama Downton Abbey brought when it first premiered last year in the U.K. or when it arrived on U.S. shores in January. Since its launch on PBS’s Masterpiece Classic, which brought in 13 million viewers, even more have discovered it on DVD and online.

Now season two is almost here, and the cast and crew are eager to find out how many of its numerous Emmy nominations will lead to wins in September. Downton Abbey’s second season will air in the U.K. beginning Sept. 18 and then stateside on Jan. 8, 2012. (Unlike the first season, which had roughly 20 minutes eliminated from the full run, season two will air in the U.S. in its entirety, without any edits.) Meanwhile, the period drama is up for a whopping 11 Emmys, including outstanding miniseries or TV movie, a category that is typically owned by pay-cable network HBO.

“Nothing is more pleasurable then when you start to reach other countries,” said creator Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park). “You take a show which is, after all, in some ways quintessentially English, and yet you find an audience beyond England. I don’t want to be too jejune. Of course, I love being nominated for things, and it’s great when you win them, but the main thing is just it demonstrates that your show has traveled, and that’s marvelous.”