'Belgravia's Midpoint Continues to Ask Viewers to Hold

As Belgravia continues, everyone's secrets boil ever closer to the surface in an hour mainly serving as a holding pattern for future revelations. This story's two-steps-forward, five-steps-back nature is highly frustrating, as at least three different sets of characters inch ever closer to discovering the series' primary secret: That Charles Pope is Lady Brockenhurt's grandson. Of course, Charles is not in any of those characters, but there's so much soapy goodness to enjoy otherwise that it's hard to stay angry that preserving this secret requires everyone to be dumb.

Watching nearly everyone on this show misbehave is vastly entertaining, though some viewers aren't necessarily here for what Belgravia is serving. Almost every central character is terrible - selfish, manipulative, and out to ruin one another simply because they can. At the moment, there are precisely two characters worth rooting for, and while they're both incredibly adorable, they're also dumb as rocks. Any one of at least a half dozen characters could drop dead immediately, and most of us wouldn't mourn. Perhaps Julian Fellowes desperately wanted to make the anti-Downton Abbey? In that, he has undoubtedly succeeded.

Lady Maria Grey is at least bright, charming, bold, and certainly knows her own mind. Is it realistic she'd be able to break an engagement with a future Earl simply because she met a merchant in the square that she liked better? Of course not. But I love Maria realizing she can't waste her life on a man like John, who will make her miserable because he is a miserable person. Also, she and Charles are too cute, even if by this point, anyone with more than three functional brain cells might at least be the slightest bit curious about why all these rich people are constantly showing up at his office to stare at him as though he were a zoo animal. To put it simply: These people are not subtle.