A Downton Abbey comeback is precisely the comforting, low-stakes palate cleanser we need

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Hprevious on to your cloche hats: a seventh season of Downton Abbey is reportedly in the works, nearly a decade after the wildly common costume drama’s finale. According to the Daily Mail, “filming has been going on for a few weeks now”, with secrecy round the manufacturing 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 supply instructed the paper.

Yes, if the rumours are true, it’d be yet one more revival of an previous TV hit – however earlier than you begin rolling your eyes in tribute to Maggie Smith’s completely unimpressed Dowager Countess, hear me out. For an extended whereas, our TV schedules have been sorely missing a soapy, foolish interval drama that’s simple on the eye, not too taxing on the mind and comparatively household pleasant (have you ever tried watching Bridgerton with mum and pa? Exactly). In an leisure panorama the place each different new launch is a miserable police procedural or ugly true-crime story, a Downton comeback is precisely the kind of comforting, low-stakes palate cleanser that we need.

When the first season of Downton aired on ITV again in 2010, it was a phenomenon. Julian Fellowes’ present mixed lavish costumes and fancy interval settings with enjoyably outrageous storylines for characters on each side of the upstairs-downstairs divide. Remember when Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) slept with a Turkish diplomat and he promptly… died of a coronary heart assault, leaving her and long-suffering servant Anna Smith (Joanne Froggatt) to get rid of the physique? Or the evil maid Sarah O’Brien’s (Siobhan Finneran) Machiavellian scheming? Add acid one-liners, principally delivered by Smith’s barely terrifying matriarch, and a powerful emotional core, too, in the type of Lord and Lady Grantham’s idealistic youngest daughter Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay), and also you had all the makings of successful. No marvel at its peak it managed to drag in a median weekly viewers of 11.5 million.

Admittedly, the wheels started to fall off the horse-drawn carriage as the six-season run went on. Things began to get a bit bonkers when Lady Mary’s paramour Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), the man she’d lastly married after a number of collection of posh craving, was brutally mown down in a automobile accident moments after assembly his new son and inheritor, in probably the least festive Christmas particular ever. Still, by this level we have been too invested in the core forged of characters to modify off. Would Lady Mary discover happiness once more? Would Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) ever cease being so catastrophically unfortunate in love? Would the household canine Isis be capable to stay a part of the present as soon as its title grew to become irrevocably related to a terrorist group?  

Even although Downton ostensibly led to 2015, it wasn’t actually over. Spin-off movies adopted in 2019 and 2022, incomes universally mediocre opinions however doing nicely at the field workplace. The present didn’t actually go well with the feature-length format, which required Fellowes to lean closely on dramatic set-piece scenes (like one weird incident in the first film, wherein somebody tries to assassinate the King at a village parade, solely to be thwarted by the Grantham’s chauffeur turned son-in-law, Branson, performed by Allen Leech) as an alternative of weaving collectively a tapestry of smaller plots and characters, as he does in his finest Downton episodes.

With Fellowes going again to episodic TV after giving the Crawley household a number of years of respiratory area, I’ve my fingers crossed for a return to the present’s earlier glory days. Plus, choosing up their story a little bit later (and permitting his characters to age a bit, which he appears to have prevented for causes of plausibility whereas the Dowager was on the scene) signifies that he could have a model new interval to sort out. The run-up to the Second World War noticed many aristocrats wrestle to carry on to their household seats (and a few of them dabbling with the far-right, Remains of the Day model), which ought to present fertile territory.

The potential forged checklist stays imprecise. How many extra instances can the ever-reliable however more and more aged Mr Carson (Jim Carter) be introduced out of retirement to coach up a brand new recruit? At this level, he’s virtually butlering’s reply to Cher, always embarking on farewell excursions solely to pop again up once more to supervise an vital ceremonial dinner. And now that Maggie Smith has lastly stated her goodbyes to the present (after a number of years of constructing enjoyably shady feedback about phoning in her efficiency: “I didn’t really feel like I was acting in those things,” she instructed the Evening Standard again in 2019), there’s a spot in the marketplace for a sharp-tongued previous battle axe. I’m certain the dames are queuing up.

Am I the solely particular person below the age of 70 excited at this hearsay? It’s fairly potential. But for TV consolation meals, Downton is laborious to beat. Bring on the second helpings.