“Downton Abbey” stars appear annually at the TV Critics Association summer press tour. PBS is still giddy about its first hit so can’t help continually promoting the imported English soap.
This year’s visitors included Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary), Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith), Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates) and Allen Leech (Tom Branson), a first time visitor to TCA who was nonetheless the hit of the panel for his wicked sense of humor.
Still, the biggest moment might have been the brief clips from the anticipated five, which debuts on PBS Jan. 4.
In it, Mary seems to be settling for Tony (though this may be a red herring), Edith seems to have some feeling for the farmer on the property who is secretly raising her baby, a shadow still hangs over Mr. Bates and the couple talks about leaving. Branson is still seeing the local teacher; they’re both outspoken at Downton dinner parties. Branson is also still trying to convince Lord Grantham that he didn’t have her over in the house alone last season.
Unlike last season’s start, Lady Mary is over her mourning period whose choice in the clip may not be her final one.
“She’s very complex,” Dockery says of her character. “I think that she’s impulsive. So she makes these decisions, and then, you know, once she goes through with it, she looks back and actually realizes it wasn’t quite the right decision.”
In season five, she says, “she’s embracing her new life really. I think she’s through the grief now. And I kind of see Series 5 for Mary as the new Mary … She’s got a bit of her bite back that we had in Series 1, which I’ve enjoyed playing, you know. It was lovely to do Series 4 with playing all of that emotion and everything, but this series is a lot more fun. So I’m enjoying it.”
As for other details about the season, Dockery would only say, with the requisite amount of intrigue and vagueness, “For every character, there are significant changes and plot points — but we wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone.”
For Froggatt’s Anna Bates, it seems to be another season of rebuilding her confidence after the sexual assault in season four.
“I was very surprised when I read the script,” Froggatt said. “But as an actress, my only first thought, in fact, was just ‘Oh, this is a huge responsibility for me, and I need to make sure I put more than a hundred percent, if that’s possible, into this.’
“My first thought was I just want any viewer that may be watching this that’s been through that experience or a similar experience in their own lives to know that I’ve taken this more seriously than I than anything else I could possibly have done and that I have really, really put my soul and heart into making this an honest performance as possible. And that’s the responsibility I felt on my shoulders.
“And the personal feedback I’ve had,” she said, “have all said the same thing, that they felt they could connect with Anna and that they were pleased the show had done this storyline. And that is the most meaningful thing, probably, that’s ever happened in my career.”
Says producer Gareth Neame, “our feeling was that although oftentimes people look at ‘Downton,’ and they think it’s a social it’s a comedy of social manners, really it’s a family saga. It’s a soft show. It’s a witty show. But we have had hard shorelines, we had a surprising storyline in the very first episode.
“The death of Mr. Pamuk in the third episode of the first season,” he said, “was an incredibly important storyline because it showed that we weren’t that dusty old genre that everybody was expecting it to be. So these kinds of storylines are important to us.”
Shirley MacLaine and Paul Giamatti won’t be back for season five, Neame said, Action will pick up six months following the end of season four.