Are the Brits Simply Smarter, or Do They Just Sound That Way?

Julian Fellowes, a Brit, wrote Downton Abbey, and he sets a scene in which Mary, the eldest sister, sketches out her own situation at dinner, in the presence of her father and her reluctant suitor, using the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda in a way you would never see in any American drama.

One of the great pleasures of this scene is that the middle class Matthew rises to the occasion and uses his more finely honed professional training to parry her thrust, more than parry, but he strikes home and wins the battle with a humble, yet telling remark. His intelligence is to question the assumptions, which are contained in Mary's telling--that gods are superior to mere mortals, and that romantic immortals are always preferable to the more humble mortals. Mary says the princess daughter in question was won by a god, rather than by just some mere mortal, which is more fitting. After all, this daughter is a great prize, is it not more fitting for her to be won by a god?

"That depends," says Matthew, shrewdly, but without raising his voice. "I'd have to know more about the princess and the sea monster in question."

Brits also wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, another incomparable melding of literature and classic text.

Maybe it's the tutor system at Cambridge. Maybe it's the dank climate.

On the other hand, these Brits are essentially trapped by what came before. They have simply never got over the Bible, Shakespeare, the classic Greek myths.

But we make our own, brewed up from our own more recent experience. Not we, but the best among us: After all, a local kid from Bethesda, Maryland migrated to Baltimore and wrote The Wire. And Americans wrote The Sopranos. To the English, this is just American Dickens and American Shakespeare.

But the comparisons cannot diminish the power of either work. Downton Abbey can evoke an imagined world of kindly aristocrats, haughty princesses, great wealth and erudition, a fictional world of imagination made to seem real, but for sheer power, one cannot match the real world of an ignored city made more vivid and more real in a fictional rendering.