Downton Abbey - Série 6

Now that the series is over, I can’t help thinking that many filmmakers would give their left arm to be able to make a first season half as good as this show’s first season. Not to mention the seasons that followed. Anyway, it’s the end of a long series that was about exactly the things I enjoy most about Britain. I will definitely miss it and I sure wouldn’t mind if a couple more seasons were made. (03/10/2017)

The first few episodes were very routine. It would seem that the development of some characters has been forgotten and conflicts are being re-created where they were resolved long ago. Then, suddenly they started coming back, long since mourned, and the whole thing started to cycle into itself. Oh, the sacred memories of Lady Sybil! Lady Mary, for a change, had a suitor with an interest in motoring, and Lady Edith was still dealing with the drama of her unacknowledged child, with the gap between old and new widening under the stairs... Yet I admit that the final drama of how much of a bitch Lady Mary is reawakened my curiosity. It's really not easy to choose Downton as a darling show where especially high society women should be loving every minute of it, and then face the fact that the main character is utterly vain, uninteresting, and awkward in every way. Fortunately, Lady Edith's stories from the milieu of her magazine are much better, and the cohort of characters in the immediate vicinity also entertains. Including the touching story of a broken homosexual and Karl Marx in a chef's apron. Yes, I'll probably never see a historical saga from the first half of the 20th century without preconceived stereotypes, but I can hope, can't I? I'm also not worried that there won't be a sequel. At least the film has already been announced. (20/02/2019)

For the vast majority of the time, I enjoyed the final season of Downton Abbey at least as much as the first four seasons. But then there was the last episode, in which the fates of all the characters were handled in the style of the most clichéd soap opera. I simply have to take this fact into account in my review, although I hate to because it degrades the overall impact of this otherwise magnificent narrative saga. (65%) (19/02/2022)