Jim Carter serves ‘Downton Abbey’ as its beloved butler

Speaking about what the future holds next, the brunette beauty said she was feeling optimistic about the future, saying: ‘I’m single at the moment so we’ll see what happens in 2016’. So, let’s officially refresh our memories with this list of key details from Downton Abbey’s fifth season that will tee (tea?) you up perfectly for that final go-round with Lady Mary. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

“Downton Abbey” airs at 9 p.m. Sundays, Jan. 3-March 6, on GPB. This is a pivotal season for surviving siblings Lady Mary and Lady Edith, one a modern woman and one a traditionalist who must change some aspects of her persona. “It was the wrong time for either of us to be in a long-term relationship”. Yet there’s hardly time to consider it, with so many characters and the pace at which the show tackles its tales. At least in the early going, moreover, he largely steers clear of the concocted travails that have occasionally made the series teeter too far into melodrama, including the long-suffering legal woes of Bates (Brendan Coyle) and Anna (Joanne Froggatt).

So Barrow is looking for a new job, preferably as a butler in a suitable estate where he’ll no longer squirm under the thumb of Downton’s head butler, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter). Does Branson make a new life in Boston?

And really, it’s ridiculous that Maggie Smith should have to sit through god-knows-how-many hours of upstairs-downstairs drama when the greatest thing about “Downton” – namely, all those sick burns she doled out as the Dowager Countess over the years – can be summed up in a series of gifs. She also said stuff like this.

Creator and writer Julian Fellowes introduces his usual array of minor dust-ups and briefly emotional subplots, but, for the first time in a few seasons, “Downton Abbey” feels purposefully structured and intent on sticking the landing. In one of the later episodes, for example, there’s as good an exchange about what bonds siblings together, whatever their differences, as you’re apt to hear. But so is this: that she met Henry Talbot (played by the dashing Matthew Goode) and there were major sparks between them, and that if all goes well, they will fall in love in season six and he will, at no point, get run over by a lorry.