And certainly not on Twitter, where even during the most-watched Grammy Awards since 1984, there were a surprising number of people discussing not Adele, or Whitney Houston, but Matthew and poor Lavinia.
Thanks to social media, I also know that I wasn't the only person who stayed up later than she'd intended last week because Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary!) was a guest on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman."
Maybe you still don't know Lady Mary from Lady Gaga. Maybe you've already succumbed to the lure of one of the season's least guilty pleasures, a potboiler set in Edwardian England.
If you're watching, you have your reasons. (And you are probably counting the minutes until Sunday's season finale.) Here are some of the reasons I'm hooked:
* Because it proves that romance isn't dead. And neither are soap operas. No matter what ABC tries to tell us.
Who cares that the obstacles placed between its obviously meant-for-each-other lovers Lady Mary and Matthew (Dan Stevens) have grown increasingly unbelievable?
Or that downstairs, the possibly even more touching relationship between the housemaid Anna (Joanne Froggatt) and the valet Bates (Brendan Coyle) has undergone its own even more dire twists? As long as the "Downton Abbey" story doesn't become boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy (or girl)-gets-unexpectedly-eaten-by-polar bear, I'm there.
* Because it's a period drama, not a period documentary.
If it sometimes seems like the Edwardians in "Downton Abbey" speak our language, it's because they often do, so much so that writer Ben Zimmer started tracking the anachronisms (with video) at www.visualthesaurus.com.
* Because no one does acid-tongued elder like two-time Oscar winner Maggie Smith, whose dowager countess, Violet Crawley, shrinks from no one.
