‘Downton Abbey’ season 4: If only this was a Maggie Smith plotline…

When writing about the recent alternate plotline for “Downton Abbey” season 4 that featured Matthew Crawley coming back to life as a zombie, we pondered whether or not ITV and the show’s producers really liked the fact that there were so many people out there frequently twisting around their property and giving it the parody treatment. At the end of the day, though, we came to one conclusion: any publicity really ought to be good publicity, and these sort of things help to keep people talking about the show ever when it is off the air.

with that in mind, we turn to the latest spoof that is starting to go viral: a rap fusion of the series with “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” featuring a man dressed up as Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess. When it comes to getting laughs, there are a few good laughs in here thanks to some of the wordplay and the references to what has happened on the series thus far. The Dowager impression is far from spot-on, but the effort more than makes up for it.

Admittedly, this is one of those videos that is really best enjoyed if you grew up watching the Will Smith series, and know the theme song well enough to watch videos of it whenever the actor is cool enough to perform it again live for his fans. While we certainly saw spoofs of this show and “The Walking Dead” coming, this is certainly not something we saw anyone being clever enough to think of.

Do you like to see these sort of spoofs created, or do you think that it actually takes something away from the actual show to see characters you want to take seriously placed into comedic settings? If you want to read some of Stevens’ recent comments about the series, you can do so by heading on over to the link here.

Photo: ITV