Most critics like it, and the reviews are warm rather than rapturous. The praise settles on the cast first: Maggie Smith’s dowager countess is singled out more than once, with Michelle Dockery close behind. Julian Fellowes’s dialogue is called witty and nuanced, and several reviewers admire how the series gives the servants’ storylines the same care as the family’s, so the two halves of the house feed each other. The setting is lavish, and nobody disputes it.
The reservations gather around the opening episode. Several find it slow going, with too much talk of wills and entails and too much historical explanation before the drama starts. The Guardian, the least enthusiastic, thinks it leans on familiar period tropes, though it still finds Smith splendid. The Times calls it no Brideshead Revisited, ambitious in a middlebrow way, and the word middlebrow recurs, not always as an insult. A few note soapy or farcical moments. The spread is narrow; no one dislikes it.