A Downton Abbey comeback is precisely the comforting, low-stakes palate cleanser we need
A brand new season of Julian Fellowes’ soapy period drama is rumoured to be in the works. It’s just what the TV schedules have been missing, says Katie Rosseinsky
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Your support makes all the difference.Hold on to your cloche hats: a seventh season of Downton Abbey is reportedly in the works, almost a decade after the wildly popular costume drama’s finale. According to the Daily Mail, “filming has been going on for a few weeks now”, with secrecy around the production sky-high. “It was such a huge success before and there are so many more stories to be told, it seemed such a shame not to be able to make more of it,” a source told the paper.
Yes, if the rumours are true, it’d be yet another revival of an old TV hit – but before you start rolling your eyes in tribute to Maggie Smith’s permanently unimpressed Dowager Countess, hear me out. For a long while, our TV schedules have been sorely lacking a soapy, silly period drama that’s easy on the eye, not too taxing on the brain and relatively family friendly (have you tried watching Bridgerton with mum and dad? Exactly). In an entertainment landscape where every other new launch is a depressing police procedural or gruesome true-crime story, a Downton comeback is precisely the sort of comforting, low-stakes palate cleanser that we need.
When the first season of Downton aired on ITV back in 2010, it was a phenomenon. Julian Fellowes’ show combined lavish costumes and fancy period settings with enjoyably outrageous storylines for characters on both sides of the upstairs-downstairs divide. Remember when Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) slept with a Turkish diplomat and he promptly… died of a heart attack, leaving her and long-suffering servant Anna Smith (Joanne Froggatt) to dispose of the body? Or the evil maid Sarah O’Brien’s (Siobhan Finneran) Machiavellian scheming? Add acid one-liners, mostly delivered by Smith’s slightly terrifying matriarch, and a strong emotional core, too, in the form of Lord and Lady Grantham’s idealistic youngest daughter Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay), and you had all the makings of a hit. No wonder at its peak it managed to pull in an average weekly audience of 11.5 million.
Admittedly, the wheels began to fall off the horse-drawn carriage as the six-season run went on. Things started to get a bit bonkers when Lady Mary’s paramour Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), the man she’d finally married after multiple series of posh yearning, was brutally mown down in a car accident moments after meeting his new son and heir, in possibly the least festive Christmas special ever. Still, by this point we were too invested in the core cast of characters to switch off. Would Lady Mary find happiness again? Would Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) ever stop being so catastrophically unlucky in love? Would the family dog Isis be able to remain part of the show once its name became irrevocably associated with a terrorist group?
Even though Downton ostensibly ended in 2015, it wasn’t really over. Spin-off films followed in 2019 and 2022, earning universally mediocre reviews but doing well at the box office. The show didn’t really suit the feature-length format, which required Fellowes to lean heavily on dramatic set-piece scenes (like one bizarre incident in the first movie, in which someone tries to assassinate the King at a village parade, only to be thwarted by the Grantham’s chauffeur turned son-in-law, Branson, played by Allen Leech) instead of weaving together a tapestry of smaller plots and characters, as he does in his best Downton episodes.
With Fellowes going back to episodic TV after giving the Crawley family a few years of breathing space, I have my fingers crossed for a return to the show’s earlier glory days. Plus, picking up their story a little later (and allowing his characters to age a bit, which he seems to have avoided for reasons of plausibility while the Dowager was on the scene) means that he will have a brand new period to tackle. The run-up to the Second World War saw many aristocrats struggle to hold on to their family seats (and some of them dabbling with the far-right, Remains of the Day style), which should provide fertile territory.
The potential cast list remains vague. How many more times can the ever-reliable but increasingly elderly Mr Carson (Jim Carter) be brought out of retirement to train up a new recruit? At this point, he’s practically butlering’s answer to Cher, constantly embarking on farewell tours only to pop back up again to oversee an important dinner party. And now that Maggie Smith has finally said her goodbyes to the show (after a few years of making enjoyably shady comments about phoning in her performance: “I didn’t really feel like I was acting in those things,” she told the Evening Standard back in 2019), there’s a gap in the market for a sharp-tongued old battle axe. I’m sure the dames are queuing up.
Am I the only person under the age of 70 excited at this rumour? It’s quite possible. But for TV comfort food, Downton is hard to beat. Bring on the second helpings.
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