Julian Fellowes and “Downton Abbey” really did a number on our common understanding of the upstairs-downstairs social dynamic. It isn’t entirely their fault, to be fair; Fellowes simply had the good luck to meet a historic moment, the end of the Great Recession, with a fable proposing that old-money British aristocrats might also be kind and generous to their happy servants.

Fellowes carries this ideal into “The Gilded Age” while also creating an aspirational couple, George and Bertha Russell, who came from nothing to conquer old Manhattan society with their wealth and a marriage connection to British nobility.

“A Woman of Substance,” based on Barbara Taylor Bradford’s 1979 bestseller, is being sold to an American audience as a “Downton Abbey” replacement. That’s not quite accurate. Think of it more as an inversion, with a bottom-up view of its heroine Emma Harte’s life viewed through parallel timelines.

One finds Emma, played by Brenda Blethyn, in the 1970s when she’s one of the richest women in the world, sitting atop a New York retail empire. As she’s being driven to her office, she’s blindsided by the news that her medical records have been leaked, revealing she is in ill health and sending company shares tumbling. A stunned Emma wonders who could have betrayed her so intimately, and why. After all, she surrounds herself with loyal, protective employees, including her own granddaughter (Mara Huf).

For answers, the story reels us back to 1911, when young Emma (Jessica Reynolds) scrubbed floors and toilets for the Fairleys, a family of British nobles. The Fairleys aren’t simply unkind, they’re cruel and cannibalistic. Adam Fairley (Emmett J. Scanlan), head of Fairley Hall, is a self-serving fop whose wife, Adele (Leanne Best), hasn’t left her room in ages and drinks from sunrise to sunset.

Adele’s plainer sister, Olivia (Lydia Leonard), is a spinster with a head for business who strokes Adam’s ego. Meanwhile, their older son, Gerald (Harry Cadby), is an elitist sex pest who abuses the help.

Emma should know better than to put her faith in her employers’ ability to recognize her intelligence and gumption. Still, she’s not immune to desire and, against her better judgment, falls for Edwin Fairley (Ewan Horrocks), Adam’s youngest son.

Rags-to-riches stories tend to be as fabulistic as tales designed to sell the upper class as fair and solicitous to the needs of working people, or amenable to Cinderella fantasies. “Downton Abbey” welcomed Tom Branson, a working-class Irishman, into their home and family when the youngest Crawley daughter, Sybil, eloped with him. It’s a nice story, but what happens to Emma is more common.

Both Emma and Edwin convince themselves that he isn’t at all like the rest of their family. They even exchange rings in secret. When Emma becomes pregnant, Edwin’s refusal to marry her is an ice-water splash to the face, waking her up and kickstarting her climb.

Emma is not simply heartbroken but angry at herself for allowing romance to distract her. Before we see her secret affair, we meet her dying mother in the cramped cottage she shares with her family. And as Ma gasps her final breaths, she makes her smart little girl promise to never lose sight of her ultimate goal.

Edwin’s slight, then, gives her an additional mission. She decides that her family, including the child she raises alone, will want for nothing. And she will grind the Fairleys into the dust to ensure that happens.

Despite the vast trove of limited series available these days, over-the-top ‘80s-style melodramas like this, sagas laced with delectable malice, simply do not exist today. “A Woman of Substance” reminds me of how much I’ve missed them, and it also makes me wonder if we might be ready for more of its kind.

When Bradford’s story was first adapted back in 1985, they set a viewership record for Channel 4, with 13.8 million tuning in for the finale. That was a one-time affair, while the new series has already earned a second season in response to its popularity in the UK, where Channel 4 streaming bragged that it is its most-watched drama in five years, averaging 3 million viewers per episode.

Notably, the show didn’t hook viewers with sex or other salacious material but, rather, plausible portrayals of greed and motivating vindictiveness. The Fairleys’ callousness toward each other mirrors the messy family dynamics of the Murdochs, the Trumps, the Musks and other astronomically wealthy families. We want nothing to do with them, yet they’ve made life worse for us, much like the Fairleys’ inattention to Emma’s dying mother and their role in her father’s death make her vengeance quest impossible to abandon.

There’s a price Emma pays for her mission, because there always is. Both younger and older Emma are fiercely admired but close themselves off to love. The most recent episode of “A Woman of Substance” closes with Emma proposing marriage to the man who owns the building housing her successful dressmaking business and curtly dumping a suitor who actually cares about her. Yet for some reason, he and the first good man to propose to her, Mac (Niall Wright), stick around to make sure Emma has strong hands to fall back on.

But that refusal to risk vulnerability comes back to bite her when the daughter she turned herself inside out to spoil pulls a move reminiscent of Veda in “Mildred Pierce,” betraying Emma for vapid reasons.

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James M. Cain’s 1941 novel and Bradford’s have that in common, along with a lot of other observations about the price of a woman’s ambition and what she trades to widen the moat between her and privation. Both Mildred Pierce and Emma Harte build their wealth by remaining clear-eyed as to what men can do for them financially as opposed to romantically.

Each story also emerged before decades of wealth expansion, with the movie version of “Mildred Pierce” coming out in 1945, right before the post-war boom. Bradford’s potboiler hit in time to meet the “greed is good” ’80s, a decade when the wealth divide increased sharply and economic survival felt only slightly less Darwinian than it does today.

The get-rich ethos that defines our time may be only rivaled by our perilously tantalizing obsession with vengeance. Mind you, it’s an expensive pursuit most of us can’t afford. That’s why that adage about living well being the best revenge tends to be offered to the party on the losing end of a betrayal. There is plenty of wisdom in that, but more satisfaction, I think, in Emma Harte’s demonstrated rebuttal. She’s determined to prove that brute-force payback is the best revenge, and dining on the carcass of your fallen enemy is the spoils of a life well-lived. It takes endless work and sacrifice, but this show makes her claws-out climb worth our attention.

“A Woman of Substance” is currently streaming on Britbox.

 

The post “A Woman of Substance” is a fiercely old-fashioned revenge saga appeared first on Salon.com.

Have you noticed there are a lot of professional basketball players named Jalen? Well, it’s not just the NBA: There are a plethora of Jalens in the NFL, and even the NHL has one. How did this name get so popular? Did all their parents watch basketball in the 1990s and fall for Jalen Rose?

There are many ways names come about, and according to Cleveland Kent Evans, there is something unique about naming traditions in the United States. Evans is the former president of the American Names American Name Society, and he writes a column for the Omaha World Herald nabout what names are popular, and why.

“In American culture, individualism is so strong. What I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different, but not too different,” he told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.  “A lot of people are picking names which are unusual to them because they don’t know anybody their own age or their parents’ age with the name.” 

So what makes some names go mainstream, and what outside factors play a role in what parents choose? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

So we have this very American individualized outlook when it comes to names. I would love to get into how other social factors shape how we name people. How does race shape our names?

The African American community has had a very different experience with naming since the 1960s. If you go back before the 1960s, unfortunately prejudiced racist people, one of the things they used to see about Black people was that they have funny names.

Statistically, before 1960, that wasn’t really true. It was like Black people had names that were like 1 or 2 percent more unusual than white people. It was very small. What happened in the ’60s as part of [the] Black Power [Movement], they turned what had been a negative into a positive. Many Black people said, “We are the people who give our children unique names to show how much we love them, to show how valued they are.” And that’s when you got the tradition of creating new names. Instead of the individual names necessarily being what went through fashions, it was the syllables they were made out of. In the ’60s and ’70s for girls, the most common prefix was law. And so you had Lakeisha, Latasha, Latoya. Then in the ’90s, the most popular prefix was Sha. And so you had Shanisha, Shaquita.

“Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name.”

How does class show up in the way we pick names?

People who are highly educated want new names for their kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. They’re the ones that go back and revive the old names, while blue-collar people are more interested in stuff which is new — things which are newly invented or things which have not been girls or children’s names until recently. 

How do names become popular?

Things do not go from zero to top 10 overnight. But what happens is you often have what I call the Hollywood feedback loop. Screenwriters in Hollywood tend to be college educated. They often are going to give their characters names which are too young for them because they name their characters like they would name a kid. The screenwriters name characters and that presents the name to the whole population. Then all of a sudden it shoots up. An example of something changing social class that way was Tristan. Tristan sort of first came up among more educated people. There was a character in the original All Creatures Great and Small. Then you have the movie Legends of the Fall, which comes out with Brad Pitt playing the character Tristan. All of a sudden the name shoots up. It was not just the educated people who were naming their son Tristan anymore very suddenly at that point. 

Are there any other examples?

One of the hugest increases just because of television was a few years ago. About 2008 there was a program on one of the cable TV networks called 16 and Pregnant. One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. The name Bentley for baby boys was one of the fastest growing boys’ names ever. It went from almost nothing to within about three years being the 75th most common name for boys in the US.

Do people ever see naming their children as a way to break from their past or from their culture? 

If you look at the immigrant groups that came from Europe in the 19th and the early 20th century, it was very common for the immigrants to want to give their kids quote “American” names. They would tend to pick things which they heard in the neighborhood. Then as the ethnic groups become assimilated, one of the ironies of that is that the grandchildren or great grandchildren of the immigrants go back and they say, “Well we want to revive our ethnic names.”

The first group that did that was the Irish. A lot of Irish people came over and they quit naming their kids things like Bridget. Then a lot of them wanted to bring back Irish names like Kevin. And then because they were doing it, those names started spreading to the whole whole country. So today Kevin is not an especially Irish American name. There are many, many Americans who have no Irish ancestry who are named Kevin. 

What advice do you have for people out there who are like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to name this kid. What am I going to do?” How should people be approaching it? How should they be thinking about it?

Well, I think first of all, they shouldn’t worry about it too much. I got a communication from a woman who had an uncle who she really loved and really admired, whose name was Floyd. She said, “Can I really name my son Floyd? Won’t he be teased too much?” I told her, “Look, you really love this uncle. What you do is you name your son Floyd, but then from the very beginning, you tell him why you named him that and why his great Uncle Floyd was a marvelous person and why you loved him so much and make him proud of it to protect him from the teasing.”

Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name. There are lots of different names that would work equally well for your child and you shouldn’t think that you have ruined their life by giving them the wrong name. 

Just a few weeks ago, Americans were able to eat salad without the fear of liquid feces and breathe in air that didn’t taste like campfire ash.

And — we were just really excited to watch some soccer. 

One major concern at the outset was whether America’s foreign and strict immigration policies would impact the levity of the games, and, at worst, deny entry to people, and perhaps even athletes and officials, from countries at odds with the current administration (it did). 

But in the early days of the World Cup, Americans and fans across the globe were surprised by how much of the world embraced coming here — and vice versa. Visiting international fans shared their astonishment at the sublime oddities this massive country has to offer, posting about: ranch dressing (in bowls if you ask nicely), unlimited refills in towering glasses, dairy products, air conditioning, Tex-Mex, ammunition displays, chicken tenders, cowboy hats, and, among other things, the Cheesecake Factory. Oh, how we all rejoiced in seeing the rest of the world experience the Byzantine beauty of our chain restaurants for the first time, and how craggy we enjoy our fried chicken strips!

@bob.travel6

First meal back in Dallas and it did not disappoint! Every single dish was amazing!! #dallas #texas #usa

♬ オリジナル楽曲 – Bob(SEA→LA→MIA→NY) with $0🇺🇸 – Bob(SEA→LA→MIA→NY) with $0🇺🇸

Adding to the cultural exchange on the sidelines, fans were also pleasantly surprised by how well the United States — historically a country that’s been bad at soccer — showed up. 

We were high off the US team’s 2-0 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina. We looked like a team with guts! Malik Tillman scored a goal down a man after star striker Folarin Balogun was sent off with a (questionable — experts said) red card. Many players on the US team have immigrant parents, are army brats, or are American by birthright citizenship (a constitutional privilege that the Trump administration has sought to dissolve). Though Belgium, in the next round, was going to be a difficult matchup, you couldn’t count out toughness. 

Even though many Americans root for the underdog, and many see themselves as underdogs, it’s rare that America is ever actually the underdog. 

But in the context of the World Cup, one of the rare things that American men will never win because soccer is one of those rare sports that no American man has ever been the best at, the stars aligned for Americans to have the scrappy longshot team of our dreams. 

But it didn’t take long for the illusion to shatter.

As the Fourth of July weekend finished, FIFA announced that it had reversed Balogun’s red card and that he would, in an exception to the rules, be allowed to play against the Belgians. The move was unprecedented and fishy. 

That red-card reversal also ripped open a portal into a nightmare realm. 

Acting like a person who can’t keep a surprise party a surprise, President Donald Trump began insinuating that he might have had something to do with the decision. Then, on the morning of the match against Belgium, Trump said that he had placed a call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino about the red card and implicitly took credit for its reversal. Infantino not only confirmed the call but said that he takes calls from important and rich people all the time — a cartoonishly suspicious response from an organization that’s historically famous for corruption. 

Trump on Balogun: "I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports … that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction … this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe … he's our best player, or one of our best… pic.twitter.com/YfIqb1JA4u

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 6, 2026

Some fans, upon learning that the laws had been bent for the host country, reacted with astonishment, if not fury. Ethically, FIFA’s bar is on the floor, and this blatant move to help the United States somehow seemed to confirm onlookers’ worst fears.

In that moment, it was clear the US was no longer an underdog. Underdogs aren’t supposed to be able to put their thumb on the scale. They surely aren’t supposed to have their papa call favors. Perhaps all that talk of guts and toughness and how the team was a band of overlooked outsiders was just a mirage — and all that ranch dressing merely a charm offensive.

Whether you’re a soccer fan or someone who is ambivalent about soccer but loved the vibes, the shift was palpable. We’re all experiencing a collective whiplash and perhaps a sports-affected melancholy. 

And now that the Cup is ending, Americans are now living in a country where vegetables, famously healthy, and good for you, carry the risk of “explosive” diarrhea. Diarrhea itself is something many would not consider a calm experience, so the idea that this is not just diarrhea but somehow a special, even worse diarrhea, one akin to detonation, feels especially terrifying. 

This week also saw swaths of the US living under a plume of wildfire smoke — the dirtiest air in the world. Breathing outside is, according to scientists, the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes. Breathing in smoke-laced air and worrying about the looming spectre of diarrhea with every meal puts the shared cultural joy we had in perspective. But even without these extreme plagues, it’s worth mourning how fleeting those moments can be.