Downton Abbey: Season 3

The third season of this lavish British costume drama, which has won a huge American audience during its PBS Masterpiece Classic airing, eases into the 1920s with weddings and funerals, births and deaths, and an aristocracy cherishing the past but reluctantly dragged into the present. While patriarch Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), desperately looks for funds to keep his manor solvent after losing a fortune, he and his wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), welcome her American mother, Martha (Shirley MacLaine), who arrives for the wedding of granddaughter Mary (Michelle Dockery) to Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens). Martha brings her tart personality and modern ideas into a lively (and often affectionate) clash with Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess (their exchanges are highlights of the early episodes). But there's plenty more melodrama among the titled lords and ladies—as well as the servants, who have their own inviolate hierarchy, with butler Carson (Jim Carter) presiding at the top. Creator-writer Julian Fellowes' Downton Abbey continues to smartly mix a wistful idealization of this world of privilege and ritual with a wily critique of the aristocracy. Presenting the uncut U.K. versions of all eight regular episodes, originally broadcast in the U.S. in 2013, plus the special “A Journey to the Highlands” finale, extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)