If You Like Downton Abbey...: Related TV/Movies/Books to Downton Abbey

Whether it's the characters or the setting or the class struggles or the time period or the castle that intrigues you about Downton Abbey, there are other television shows and movies that contain the same hooks and similar intriguing elements.

Look at this page to find other television programs(plus some of their matching books) that you can watch while waiting for new Downton Abbey to come out.

Soon to be a PBS Masterpiece series starring Samantha Bond (Downton Abbey) and Francesca Annis (Cranford). Away from the frontlines of World War II, in towns and villages across Great Britain, ordinary women were playing a vital role in their country's war effort. As members of the Women's Institute, an organization with a presence in a third of Britain's villages, they ran canteens and knitted garments for troops, collected tons of rosehips and other herbs to replace medicines that couldn't be imported, and advised the government on issues ranging from evacuee housing to children's health to postwar reconstruction. But they are best known for making jam: from produce they grew on every available scrap of land, they produced twelve million pounds of jam and preserves to feed a hungry nation. Home Fires, Julie Summers's fascinating social history of the Women's Institute during the war (when its members included the future Queen Elizabeth II along with her mother and grandmother), provides the remarkable and inspiring true story behind the upcoming PBS Masterpiece series that will be sure to delight fans of Call the Midwife and Foyle's War. Through archival material and interviews with current and former Women's Institute members, Home Fires gives us an intimate look at life on the home front during World War II.

Where Angels Fear to Tread is both a novel by E.M. Forster and a 1991 film adaptation starring Rupert Graves, Helena Bonham Carter, Helen Mirren, and Judy Davis.

Follow English widow Lilia Herriton as she tries to escape her husband's death by taking a trip to Italy. Looking to releax, she meets a young Italian man, Gino, who happens to be much younger than she. Her dead husband's family disapproves and sends her former brother-in-law, Philip, to hopefully break up the two's marriage. Philip and Lilia are forced to take a step back and examine their own separate lives as tragedy descends upon the family. If you're a fan of the melodrama in Downton Abbey, then the aching need to survive and move on that accompany the characters in both this novel and the movie adaptation may appeal to you.

The Forsyte Saga is a trilogy by John Galsworthy that was first published in 1922 that covers the books: The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let. In 2002, Granada Television did a two series run for the ITV Network in Britain. This two-part series then ran in the US as part of Masterpiece Theatre.

The Forsyte Saga begins in the 1870s and runs until the 1920s, giving fans of Downton Abbey the ability to see the time period before Downton Abbey begins in 1921. This trilogy follows the life of an upper middle class family in England from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Similar to Downton Abbey, family members struggle with duty vs. desire and how each generation brings change to the family and the struggle to both hold onto tradition, yet also keep the family on pace with the times.

Brideshead Revisited is of interest to Downton Abbey fans that enjoyed the outsider look into aristocratic life. Enjoy either the book, miniseries, or movie to follow Charles Ryder, a middle-class common man, who becomes entangled in aristocratic life when he meets Sebastian Flyte, a blue-blood young man who attends Oxford with Ryder. Ryder is thrust into aristocratic life and the two young men inextricably navigate the confusing waters of love, religion, war, famiy, and alcoholism together. Add in Flyte's sister, marriage proposals, falling outs, and atheism and readers are sure to be drawn into the aristocratic web that Flyte and his family weave throughout the book and television adaptations.