Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess may have gotten the last word on "Downton Abbey" as a series, but we don't really have to say farewell, do we?
Oh, good! Thankfully, hope lives on that we may revisit the Crawleys and company in a movie and/or spinoff series. Creator and executive producer Julian Fellowes and executive producer Gareth Neame shared plans with Variety in a story posted after last night's series finale.
The finale had happy endings all around, including for poor put-upon Edith, who ended up getting married and outranking everyone in the family. As Neame put it, "Mary hates that her sister has trumped her. The rest of the family thinks it's quite amusing and well deserved. It's really interesting to imagine what Edith's future might be. Maybe we'll see that if there's a movie."
Yes, a movie! It's not just wishful thinking to imagine Downton on the big screen, although IF it does happen, it won't happen anytime soon.
Fellowes told Variety, "I'm completely up for a movie. There are various considerations, which of the cast would be available. That would be a big thing. If we couldn't get enough of them to do it, it wouldn't really work. But as far as I'm concerned, I'm completely up for it." Neame added, "There may be [a movie] but still there's nothing to confirm at the moment. These are all conversations we are having. Julian and I haven't shied away from saying we would like to do it. The cast would be up for doing it. But it's a whole new thing to put together. It's a whole new beast. It's a whole way off were it to happen." But if the cast are up for it, that's a good sign, even if it may be a few years away.Variety also asked, more hypothetically it seems, which characters they'd focus on if they did a spinoff.
Fellowes answered, "I think Carson and Mrs. Hughes running a B&B hotel, I could see that. I think you could do Branson and Henry running the car business and building it up and having all the saga of cars in the '20s." Here's what Neame suggested: "I would come back in the 1960s and Master George would now be the Earl of Grantham. He'd have no staff, maybe two, and he'd be trying to run the estate. He might have turned it into a theme park type thing. Or I would do a half-hour show with Carson and Mrs. Hughes, when they've gotten their own property and he's making her cook him dinner every night. I loved those scenes!"Well, from here, we're giving green lights to all of those ideas. The Carson/Hughes one could be like a sitcom, and following Master George in the '60s would be fascinating and worthy of its own dramatic series. Go for it, "Masterpiece" team!
Would you watch a "Downton" movie and/or spinoff, or do you think they should let the story end on that happy note?
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