Your Mom Is Right: Everybody Loves Downton Abbey

More than 10.2 million people tuned in to the season four première of Downton Abbey on Sunday night. Or put another way: Roughly 3 percent of the entire U.S. population spent a weekend evening watching a British period drama on PBS.

Americans are watching this season of Downton Abbey about three and a half months after it aired in Britain, where it averaged 11.8 million viewers per episode—that’s 18.6 percent of the British population—and became the U.K.’s most watched drama. That it was a hit in its home country was expected. But in the U.S., the saga of a moneyed family in 1922 makes for unusual blockbuster TV fare. The most popular cable dramas have historically had strong male protagonists involved in some pretty reprehensible things—The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad—whereas Downton Abbey focuses increasingly on its relatively benign heroine, Mary Crawley, and, to a lesser extent, her younger sister, Edith, and Mary’s maid, Anna. Edith and Anna become even more important this season—not to mention the fact that Matthew Crawley, the show’s cute male lead, was killed off in season three—making the show even more female-centric than before.