‘Downton Abbey’ relishes final season

Tribune News Service

HIGHCLERE, England

On a recent afternoon, the skies over Highclere Castle were a brilliant blue more reminiscent of Southern California than the Hampshire countryside, but otherwise things on location at “Downton Abbey” were characteristically English.

There were stiff upper lips among cast and crew, despite the fact that the period piece is more than halfway through filming its sixth and final season.

“We’re not in the least bit sentimental yet,” said Hugh Bonneville, who plays the Crawley family’s proud but bungling patriarch, Lord Grantham. The actor was seated beneath a priceless Van Dyck portrait of King Charles I in the dining room at Highclere, a space that, like the offices of Sterling Cooper or the hills of King’s Landing, has become familiar to viewers in this age of celebrated TV drama.

The series, which airs stateside on PBS under the “Masterpiece” banner, has broken out well beyond the niche audience of Anglophiles and costume-drama enthusiasts to become not only the most-watched drama in the network’s history but also one of the most- popular shows on American television. It has 51 prime-time Emmy nominations, and its sprawling cast has twice won the Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble in a drama series.

The fifth season, which ended with the crowd-pleasing engagement of Carson, Downton’s curmudgeonly butler, to Mrs. Hughes, the estate’s quick-witted housekeeper, averaged nearly 13 million weekly viewers – barely a dip from the previous year. So why end it now?

“Well, you know, life is a process of hellos and goodbyes,” said series writer and creator Julian Fellowes. “We all know that nothing lasts forever, and you want to leave when they’re still sorry you’re going.”

The original plan had been to end the show after Season 5, but executive producer Gareth Neame pushed for one more season in order to tie up the many narrative loose ends. It also feels right to end the series as it pushes into the late 1920s, said executive producer Liz Trubridge. “We’ve hit a time in history when things are changing. We’ve gone a long way from 1912 to 1925; that’s a huge piece of social history that has never been told this way before.”

Sometime in more-recent history – circa 2008 – Neame came to Fellowes with the idea for a series that would tell the intertwining stories of an aristocratic family and their servants in the waning days of the Edwardian era. Fellowes, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for “Gosford Park,” was initially reluctant to revisit the upstairs-downstairs milieu but soon sent Neame an outline for what would become “Downton Abbey.”

British network ITV quickly scooped up the project, but an American distributor proved more elusive. Over lunch at Highclere’s tea shop, Neame recalled an unnamed TV executive who told him that nobody in America would be interested.

“Downton Abbey” has proved the skeptics wrong.

“Downton Abbey” has turned its ensemble cast, including veteran character actors Jim Carter, Phyllis Logan, Penelope Wilton and Lesley Nicol, into celebrities.

There are many questions to be answered in the season ahead: Will Carson and Mrs. Hughes work together romantically as well as they do professionally? Will Daisy finally decide to leave service and become a farmer or, better yet, a revolutionary? Will the Bateses get a break already?

The sense of anticipation is high all around, said Carter. “We wait for the thud of the script through the letterbox.”