Preserve your eye on that grandfather clock — the fifteenth anniversary of Downton Abbey is sort of right here. The franchise hits that milestone on September 26, two weeks after the September 12 launch of its third and closing movie, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.
PBS’s Masterpiece anthology opened the Abbey’s doorways for us in 2010, and since then, we’ve seen the members of the aristocratic Crawley household and its workers progress via the early twentieth century — getting older, rising up, beginning households, beginning new careers, having fun with joyous highs, and enduring devastating lows, all whereas calamitous world occasions threatened their livelihoods.
Don’t overlook: It was the sinking of the Titanic that thwarted the plan to marry Girl Mary (Michelle Dockery) off to her second cousin, Patrick, to maintain the Crawleys’ fortune with the instant kin. The household learns in Downton’s collection premiere that Patrick was aboard that doomed ocean liner, and the subsequent inheritor in line is a good-looking unknown named Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens)…
So started many onscreen trials and tribulations for the Crawleys and their servants. Right here’s how we’d rank the seasons that ensued.