Final season of ‘Downton Abbey’ begins in US

“Downton” returns for its sixth and final season, Sunday, Jan. 3, 2016, at 9 p.m. EST on PBS. The wage bill for the servants has tripled since the war ended, leaving Mr. Carson faced with the prospect of laying off a servant or two, even while stuck between Mrs. Hughes and Lady Mary in his own uncomfortable version of Bride Wars.

“Downton Abbey” opened Season 1 with a crisis sparked by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

Filmed mainly at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, the (real) Earl of Carnarvon’s country estate, “Downton Abbey” unfolds in one of those “great houses” that tend to bedrafty, impossible to clean without a small army of minions, and rack up huge utility bills. But its main concern always returns to the marching of time, and a changing world where upstairs and downstairs are no longer so divided. His word, putting forward the policies and whims of the aristocratic Crawley clan, is law for those in his charge. “It just didn’t make sense”.

Few television series have the luxury of not only planning their ending, but being given the time to craft it in a way that feels like the right kind of goodbye.

“We didn’t want to leave”, Ms. Dockery added. It was the first on-camera stuff I had ever done.

Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham) felt the same way when Elizabeth McGovern wound up in the role of his wife, Lady Crawley. Will their daughter, headstrong Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), deign to say yes to her latest suitor?

In their world full of tragedy and scandal, Mary’s maid, Anna, along with her long-suffering valet husband, Mr. Bates, are still on their long-time bad luck.

The show is a U.K.-U.S. coproduction and it’s as big in America as it is here. “I wanted it to feel complete”, he explains. Surely he’ll get a similar opportunity home at Downton Abbey?

Asked about his initial reaction to the script for the Downton Abbey pilot, Carter said their was one line that caught his attention: “Carson sits there in his magnificence.’ And I thought, ‘I can do that.’ You want an actor to sit in magnificence?”

One thing he particularly liked was how Carson’s starchiness and pomp had a humorous edge.

Carter says Carson takes his job seriously and is very strict about the standards at Downton, and gets upset whenever they are disrupted or breached by his coworkers. “Over my dead body!’ And I relish playing those moments”.

“I do think so”. “But I was just delighted for the work”.

He somehow had escaped notice on a stroll near his mid-Manhattan hotel. “I was walking around Boston and must have been stopped 20 times”. “Nashville, Tennessee. Cambodia. Ghana”.

While many would love to cosy up to Downton’s burly Branson, Charlie was less than star stuck when the pair started dating, in fact she had no idea who he was.

By all accounts, the final days of shooting last August were emotional affairs for the “Downton” gang. “I never knew such reforming zeal”.

“We could say it had something to do with the mortgage bubble in the USA, and the haves and the have-nots, and the big one per cent thing”, says Beverley Shenken, vice-president for TV content at Vision.

Anyone looking for Keith Urban and Harry Connick Jr.to rip off their Mr. Nice Guy masks will be deeply disappointed by the two-part premiere of “American Idol”‘s final season.

Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press.