Titanic: The Miniseries

Julian Fellowes's forte is to explore the world of the classes, specifically in Britain, having written the screenplays for the Oscar winner, Gosford Park, and the acclaimed miniseries, Downton Abbey. And there is no place where the class division was as apparent as on the Titanic. So, for this 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Famous vessel, it is not surprising that Julian Fellowes would take on dramatizing the tragedy.

Unlike James Cameron's megahit, the miniseries follows the lives of many passengers, from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd classes, as well as servants of 1st class passengers, and crew members. Because, after all, this is Julian Fellowes writing the script.

I was disappointed in the miniseries. It was an interesting decision to end each episode with the ship hitting the iceberg. However, I think it made the miniseries feel very disjointed. By the end of the third hour, I wanted to say, just get on with the real drama, which I felt a bit bad about because real people experienced the tragedy, although none of the main characters were based on real people, as far as I know.

Which brings me to another disappointment I had in the show at first. I wished that that the main characters hadn't been fictitious. They could have given the characters names of real people. I thought later, however, those people have descendants or relatives, and it's easier not to worry about getting the ire up of any of them if they didn't like the way they were portrayed, so, it's easier to go fictional. Also, I thought that most of the people who were actually on the ship probably just ate, slept, sat on deck, read books, played cards, etc. and where is the drama in that? The sinking of the ship is the real drama of the whole tragedy.

The whole miniseries couldn't just be after the ship hit the iceberg. We had to care about the characters, which, I'm sorry to say for the most part I didn't. There were so any characters, and I knew from the start, as everyone did, that some would live and some would die so I almost didn't want to get too attached. The conceit of giving us bits of information a little at a time about the characters made their stories so disconnected that I found it hard to get very emotionally involved in their lives and care about them anyway. The only person I had any emotional feelings for was John Batley, who was played so well by Toby Jones. The moment when the lifeboat comes to pick him up and he doesn't want to leave his dead wife was heartbreaking. 

There were real characters from the ship in the miniseries, but their stories weren't central, and I'm not sure that they were totally accurate with all of the people who really were on the ship.