A new trailer for the upcoming HBO miniseries Parade's End is now available. We recently posted a teaser for the five-part adaptation of the Madox Ford novels starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, and Adelaide Clemens, but this new trailer informs on the plot a bit more. The WWI-era story centers on a love triangle of sorts between Christoper Tietjens (Cumberbatch), his adulterous wife Sylvia (Hall) and the alluring Valentine Wannop (Clemens). Tietjens holds to an increasingly outdated moral code which complicates matters quite severely. While many will draw comparisons between Parade's End and the similarly-themed Downton Abbey, Cumberbatch is quick to make a rather brusque distinction. Hit the jump to watch the new trailer and see what Cumberbatch had to say.
First, here's the new trailer for HBO's presentation of the U.K. miniseries, Parade's End (via The Playlist):
While it's all rather Downton-y for someone whose only exposure to a British examination of social classes in a World War I-era backdrop is Downton Abbey (ie, me), Cumberbatch took offense to the comparison in an interview with Reader's Digest, saying:
“We’re remembering that there was a world before the First World War. We’re living in a culture now that’s revering, or having a nostalgia trip with, the beginning of the 1900s. Although Downton traded a lot on the sentiment in the last series…but we won’t talk about that series because it was, in my opinion, f*****g atrocious...I thought, Are we pandering to a taste? But this is so much more sophisticated, so much more unusual. You rarely see a piece about this class of people that’s this accurate, funny and pointed. We’re not making some clichéd comment: ‘Oh, isn’t it awful the way there’s this upstairs-downstairs divide.’ This is about class and love, an elegy to a dying era. It’s the final mad waltz of Edwardian society into this war-game idiocy.”
Take that, Julian Fellowes! You've just been Cumberbatch'd!
Parade's End will air on HBO for three consecutive nights starting February 26th.
