Late in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale—the final chapter in the unwieldy Downton Abbey extended universe—one of the Crawley family’s far-flung members, Harold Levinson (Paul Giamatti), says “sometimes I feel like the past is a more comfortable place than the future.” This caps off a longer conversation, one in which Harold admits England’s quaint predictability tempts him away from America’s imposing march forward. Each character hums in agreement, nestled against the carved brick of their grand home, gazing across a sea of mossy green hills.
This is the image that has come to represent all things Downton, the first thing viewers were greeted with as they tuned in week by week during the show’s original run: The house, standing as a bastion of tradition against tides of social change, immovable in its predictability, against an intimidatingly blue sky. But truth and feeling have always been indistinguishable in this world, Downton standing like a mirage, beckoning an audience forward to its enticing haven of unreality. It comes as no surprise then, as Downton ends, its promise of a more complicated take on its genre vanishes into thin air.
Downton Abbey‘s unmitigated popularity and success enabled it to power through a series of natural conclusions (first with the end of the original series‘ run, then later with the death of Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey: A New Era). But, as per the title, The Grand Finale has been billed as the final goodbye (with a faintly apologetic “No, we promise this time we’re done” from the cast on their press tour), an auspicious end to an unbelievably lucrative property. Befitting such an end, creator Julian Fellowes’ script is laden with references to time, to goodbyes and to the process of moving on. All at once, Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) is passing on the ownership of the Abbey to his daughter Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) must yield running the staff to the less experienced Andy (Michael Fox), and Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) cedes head cook duties to her protégé Daisy (Sophie McShera). It’s a simplistic way to summarize a 15-year long project, with a cutesy flourish designed to suggest the future rather than grapple with the present.
The Grand Finale reiterates this pattern over and over, largely abandoning the prospect of the unexpected to settle for something warm and inviting. Gone are the days of trench warfare cut between scenes of tea at the Abbey. Instead, this film is mostly contained to the wide, empty plains of the estate—practically myopic in its focus on the family and staff’s affairs. The Grand Finale picks up in 1930, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 has robbed the Grantham estate of their American fortune. But this is just a cursory plot point, used to propel the Crawleys into their next phase. The film has been described as “a love letter to the fans” and as such it discards its wider historical context to offer something intensely internal, rife with self-mythology.
Such a sentimental conclusion is only explicable in light of the series’ staggering early success, a victory lap for a property that long ago defined its genre. Historically, period dramas draw in a steady stream of (generally older) viewers keen to immerse themselves in lavish worlds where class conflict is tidily contained in binary social stratification. Downton Abbey embraced this baked-in audience while simultaneously complicating its appeal, offering something a bit grittier than audiences had come to expect from the genre. By the third episode, a maid and two ladies lurched across a hall at midnight, carrying the dead body of a diplomat who had died in the bed of a Crawley daughter. All period dramas are defined by their willingness to blur historical truth with heightened emotions, but Downton expertly walked the precarious line between the two. Half a season would be wholly preoccupied with “Who stole the silver polish?” or “Who will run the county garden show?” until, with very little warning, two to three characters succumbed to an era-specific illness. It moved with uneven jolts, starting and stopping in the way history does.
Fellowes kept his audience rapt not by introducing something new, but by showing a familiar recipe being perfected—a heady mix of certainty and unexpectedness finding its balance. Downton was defined by stretches of easygoing, low-stakes, upstairs-downstairs interplay, peppered with startling violence, displaying atypical levels of gore and intrigue, with Lord Grantham literally projectile vomiting blood in a later season. With Downton, Fellowes proved that audiences’ desire for escapism was tempered by a need for something angrier and more acerbic. In season one, as he had previously hinted at with his Oscar-winning script for Gosford Park, Fellowes suggested that the untouchable upper echelon must first be punished and brought down to a more reachable, human level in order for the everyman to empathize with them. With The Grand Finale, Fellowes’ places the aristocracy back out of reach, atop their pedestal, betraying that early acidic wit with something frothy and self-congratulatory.
Late in The Grand Finale, Mrs. Patmore explains to a newly promoted Daisy that her retirement was inevitable. “Our lives are lived in chapters,” she murmurs. It’s a convenient observation for a franchise-capper, delivered with the simplicity and soothing of a parent putting their child to bed. Even so, it’s strangely potent. Life does seem to happen randomly until we look back, exercising our ability to categorize it into stages. In the end, though, these “chapters” of Crawley life all conclude on an eerily similar note, with the Crawleys on top as always, standing as the kings of their castle. Mary inherits her family estate. Her son George will inherit it from her. This is the dynastic vision, hinted at from the first episode of the first series, a feel-good success cycle dissociated from whatever may loom on the horizon—specifically, World War II, into which George will likely be conscripted and die in the next decade. But of course the past is more comfortable to dwell on than the future; it’s easier to come to a long-telegraphed end by ignoring what could happen and romanticizing what already has.
The original run of Downton Abbey both typified and revolutionized the period drama, part wish fulfilment and part graphic history. The uneven engagement with these two modes created a world that felt dramatically unstable and emotionally compelling, comfortable lives propulsively pushed and pulled away from the past. With The Grand Finale, Fellowes proves that the fate of Downton Abbey was never to fully tie the past to the present, giving us a new lens through which to view typically rose-tinted period tropes. Instead, as popularity soared and a fandom accumulated, the Crawleys and their servants were always destined to finish right back where they started.
