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‘Downton Abbey’ Producer on Faith, Family, a Movie and the End

‘Downton Abbey’ Producer on Faith, Family, a Movie and the End

Last updated on: March 26, 2015 at 4:02 pm by Kate O'Hare

‘Downton Abbey’ Producer on Faith, Family, a Movie and the End 2015-03-26T16:02:13-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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Today (Thursday, March 26), Carnival Films and PBS’ “Masterpiece” announced that the upcoming season 6 of the family saga “Downton Abbey” will be its last.

Created and entirely written by British Catholic Julian Fellowes — whom I profiled for CatholicVote earlier this year, and recently featured in Pax Culturati — “Downton Abbey” follows the aristocratic Crawley family, whose “Upstairs, Downstairs” existence in their palatial house (actually Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England) is fading in the wake of World War I, and the onslaught of rapid social and technological change.

Also today, “Downton” executive producer, and managing director of Carnival, Gareth Neame got on the phone with U.K. and U.S. press, including Pax Culturati. He refused to say much about the upcoming season — comprising 11 hours over nine episodes, with the U.K. finale airing on Christmas night — but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any news.

On going out on a high note:

[We want] people to love and remember that show for many, many years to come and not feel that there was any sort of drop-off, that we outstayed our welcome. We still have lots to say in this new season. But we made the decision, and it’s one that has been made by Julian Fellowes and me, in conjunction with the cast, and we all all feel this is the time.

It was really a joint decision, because, obviously, Julian has “The Gilded Age” coming up for NBC, which has been on hold now for a couple of years, waiting for him to finish “Downton Abbey.”

On why you shouldn’t blame ITV (the U.K. broadcaster) or PBS:

They’ve been brilliant broadcasters, utterly supportive of the show. I don’t think it’s unfair for me to say that they would like the show to go on as long as possible.

On preparations for the end:

Having found, for a little while now, that we were going to bring the show to an end, it’s meant that we’ve been developing these characters, and we very much have an eye to where the characters will end up, what’s going to happen.

I think this will make the sixth season, I hope, the most satisfying of them all. Our fans live with these characters. We’ve seen characters we love die; we’ve seen babies born, which are now, in the last season, small children.

There really is a sense that this is a family. People will be hugely excited to see where this family ends up.

On rumors that there may be a “Downton Abbey” movie:

Yes, I can confirm that there have been rumors that there might be a “Downton” movie. Our position on that is that we would be very interested in that. It’s definitely something that we’re contemplating, that would be great fun to do. It’d be a wonderful extension of everything that people love about the TV show.

But I can’t confirm that it’s definitely going to happen. It’s going to take a lot of planning and thinking about. We shall see.

On a spin-off (perhaps, for example, featuring the family’s Boston-bound Irish-Catholic chauffeur Tom Branson, the widower of youngest Crawley daughter Sybil, and father of their daughter, who was baptized Catholic):

There are no plans to make a spin-off. There has been, again, endless speculation about this, but there are no definite plans for a spin-off. Again, I couldn’t rule it out.

On issues of faith, since the show has featured the Turkish (and possibly Muslim) Mr. Pamuk; Tom, whose Catholicism didn’t sit well with Downton’s staunchly Anglican patriarch Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham; and, in this past season, when Crawley relative Lady Rose crossed religious lines by marrying a British aristocrat from a Ukrainian Jewish family:

Interesting question. There has never been any comeback [negative reaction] about religious subjects. We’ve done them, because religion is a part of people’s lives, and it would have been, in those days, even more than it is today.

In the last season, we went into the storyline where Rose is married, and we covered that territory, because there was certainly a degree of anti-Semitism in some parts of the aristocracy at that time. We thought it was a really interesting territory to explore.

So, religion is part of our lives, just as work and family and health and happiness — all these things make up life.

On “Downton” as the end of an era:

Right at the beginning of this show, it was about the end of a way of life, the end of a particular era of history. That will come into great relief in the sixth season. The way of life we depict, that people so enjoyed, the idea of aristocracy and the extraordinary life they led, it’s all coming to an end.

On his fantasy dinner party:

I imagine it being a “Downton Abbey” scenario, and I thought, if you can have Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright [the president and first lady] from “House of Cards” invited to dinner with the Crawleys, and also about three or four characters from “Game of Thrones” — probably the ones who don’t use knives and forks.

There’s lords and whatnot in “Game of Thrones,” but this would have to be ripping hunks of meat in front of the Dowager.

Neame also mentioned that Carnival is currently in production in Hungary on “The Last Kingdom” for the BBC and BBC America. Writer Stephen Butchard (“Good Cop,” “House of Saddam”) is adapting Bernard Cornwell’s (“Sharpe”) best-selling “The Saxon Stories” novels.

The eight-episode drama is set in 872 A.D. in Wessex, the only Saxon kingdom — under the leadership of Catholic St. King Alfred the Great — to withstand the onslaught of the Vikings. It centers on the son of a Saxon nobleman, orphaned and then raised by the Vikings, who struggles to figure out where he belongs.

Said the BBC press release:

The Last Kingdom, made by Carnival Films, is a show full of heroic deeds and epic battles but with a thematic depth that embraces politics, religion, warfare, courage, love, loyalty and our universal search for identity. Combining real historical figures and events with fictional characters, it is the story of how a people combined their strength under one of the most iconic kings of history in order to reclaim their land for themselves and build a place they call home.

Image: Courtesy PBS’ “Masterpiece”

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