The sole audio commentary for Titanic, appropriately for episode 1 only, since it’s the only interesting episode of this miniseries, states that it was dreamed up in 2008 to observe the eventual 100th anniversary of the famous ship’s sinking. The script was likely written before Downtown Abbey was even a set of scripts, so even though the slipcover touts with a sticker that this is from Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downtown Abbey, that should be remembered, because Fellowes doesn’t have as much a confident handle on class separations as he does in that series.

The first part gathers the main characters that will sail first-class, second-class, third-class, and steerage on Titanic, including a man, his wife and four children, learning in the second episode that the man was in charge of the electric wiring on the ship, John Batley (Toby Jones) and his wife, and Hugh, Earl of Manton (Linus Roache), for whom Batley works as his lawyer. Batley is valuable to Hugh because of a potentially damaging secret of his that he keeps, but since his social standing in life is not as vaunted as that of Lord Manton, he travels second-class, and doesn’t mind it, even though his wife, Muriel (Maria Doyle Kennedy) is disgusted at how he has such awe-filled respect for Lord Manton. Louisa, Countess of Manton (Geraldine Somerville) doesn’t like Batley or his wife and wonders why Hugh insists on inviting them to tea, since they’re so obviously not of the same class and therefore are to be seen as lower than they are. In fact, Lord Manton collects Batley and his wife from the second-class part of the ship for tea.

Titanic 2012From this story alone, you get the idea of what to expect. There is a lot of tension between classes, complaints among first-class passengers about other first-class passengers, glares, fake conversations, and fake smiles. The only relief in such a stifling setting is Lady Georgiana Grex (Perdita Weeks), daughter of Hugh and Louisa, who does not see such class separation as necessary, nor approves the social rules of her higher class, and discards them. She’s not Rose (Kate Winslet) when she dances in steerage in James Cameron’s classic epic, but she has the same mind. Who cares about observed niceties? People are people no matter who they are or what they do. Her romance with Harry Widener (Noah Reid), for whom the Widener Library at Harvard is named, is one of the only satisfying aspects of this miniseries. They are so obviously meant to be refreshing after the stuffiness of watching the first-class passengers, but Weeks and Reid’s performances are so easy to like.

There is also a blooming romance between Paolo Sandrini (Glen Blackhall), who his brother Mario (Antonio Sandrini) brings on board to serve as a first-class waiter, and  Annie Desmond (Jenna-Louise Coleman), second-class maid and servant to the first-class help’s dining room, which is more naturally sweet than obvious, as it is between Georgiana and Harry.

Despite these great performances, with Toby Jones remaining a consummate chameleon of accents and faces, the most fascinating character is Second Office Lightoller (Steven Waddington), who’s agreeable to everyone, no matter their class, and helpful to many. Amidst the hard-headedness of Chief Officer Wilde (Will Keen), suddenly made chief officer before the voyage, and First Officer Murdoch (Brian McCardie), chafing under his command (he was to be chief officer), Lightoller is fine with his position, and it makes one wonder if the real Lightoller was like this, a reason to dig into the Titanic history books to see if this was so.

Titanic insists on being so different from its predecessors, with each episode up to the fourth ending with the ship well into sinking, and the beginning of each episode doubling back to before the sailing, to show us these passengers as they were before the ship sailed. Because of this, scenes that we have already seen are repeated, and watching those scenes again as well as where other characters are placed during those scenes, suddenly revealed when we didn’t seen them in the first showing of these scenes, raises the question of why Titanic couldn’t just go in chronological order. Start from the wiring, the objections by shipbuilder Thomas Andrews (Stephen Campbell Moore) to J. Bruce Ismay (James Wilby) and Lord Pirrie about things being done too cheaply in the building of the ship, Second Officer Lightoller checking the count on the food supplies, and then go on from there. In the fervent desire to be different, Titanic feels disjointed and even though Georgiana and Harry and the Batleys and the Mantons and Paolo and Annie and Lightoller stand out, there’s not a great deal of emotional investment to be had in these characters. Benjamin Guggenheim’s (David Eisner) insistence on just sitting there, waiting for the sinking, looks silly, as it should, but there’s nothing much to know of Guggenheim himself during this sailing because there’s so much concern for making this different. Georgiana and Harry and Paolo and Annie and Lightoller get enough time for their development, but other characters are given short shrift. Instead of being so intimidated by what came before, Fellowes should have remembered that stories are often retold, as it has been with Titanic.

The audio commentary with Fellowes, producer Nigel Stafford-Clark, and director Jon Jones, moderated by Robert Ross, of course talks about how great the story of Titanic is, concern about what came before, but is a pretty dull affair, which is perhaps because most of what’s seen feels dull. Fellowes simply tried too hard.

Only the DVD was reviewed since this reviewer is still staunchly supportive of the DVD format and doesn’t own a Blu-Ray player, so it should be known that for Blu-Ray, which is included in a combo pack with the DVD, the miniseries is on one disc with the audio commentary, and there’s a second disc with six making-of featurettes, Titanic: Behind the Production, and a documentary called The Curse of the Titanic Sisters, about Titanic and her two sister ships, the Olympic and the Britannic.

Titanic will stand as just one of the bunch, alongside the 1996 TV miniseries which starred George C. Scott and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and others. The performances mentioned are worthwhile, but prepare to fast-forward during the third episode and pretty much all of the fourth episode, stopping only for these particular actors. Fellowes has done much better elsewhere.