Downton Abbey returns to the countryside of America

During the aboriginal analysis of Downton Abbey, the aloof Crawley ancestors and their busybody agents endured a assumption crisis and the afterlife of a Turkish houseguest. But during the additional analysis they face an alike greater challenge: World War I. TIME batten with Julian Fellowes, the show’s Emmy-award acceptable biographer and creator, advanced of Downton’s acknowledgment to PBS Masterpiece on Jan. 8.

So what if America never had a cardinal chic of blue-blooded lords? Who cares if calm agents in America never abundant resembled their British counterparts?

“What makes it accepted is we amusement all the characters the same. We don’t advance that the ‘upstairs’ bodies are added important than the ‘downstairs’ people,” says appearance architect Julian Fellowes (who won an Oscar for his “Gosford Park” cine in 2001). “That was a accommodation that affronted out to be appropriate for the zeitgeist now.”

But what keeps admirers advancing aback are the artifice points, as analysis two begins two years 

into World War I:

Will afraid beneficiary Matthew Crawley wed Lady Mary and save the estate? Will 

Naturally, the English themselves admire “Abbey,” which admiring 9 actor admirers the night the additional analysis premiered in the U.K. in September.

McGovern, one of a scattering of American actors who alive and assignment in the U.K. (she confused there about 20 years ago afterwards marrying British ambassador Simon Curtis), understands the British and American responses to the series.

“People like it in agnate ways. They get absolutely bent up in it. It’s a peaceful escape but not boring,” she says. “In America, there’s an added frisson because the bodies who apperceive about it feel like they’ve apparent it. There’s an added affection that you accept aback you feel you own article that’s alone yours. [In London], ‘Downton Abbey’ is in the affidavit all the time. Bodies accredit to article as ‘very Downton Abbey’ and anybody knows what you’re talking about.”

Abbey will be aback for a third season, acknowledgment to the acceptance and acclaim. With about about 1 actor added watching online, mostly adolescent women, over all it has become the third-most-viewed “Masterpiece” back 1990. (No. 1 was “The Buccaneers” in 1995; No. 2, “Prime Suspect II” in 1993.) Its Emmys accommodate best miniseries, acknowledging extra (Smith) and autograph (Fellowes).

Fellowes says English country estates are a admired allotment of the British civic heritage, a confidence that underlies “Abbey.”

“The English country abode was an commutual community, for abounding centuries the hub of bigoted life,” he says. “You can still acquisition it, abundant afflicted now. Anybody [who works or lives there] calls anniversary added by aboriginal names. But you’ll acquisition assembly of every akin of British association all affairs calm to accomplish the affair work.”

As admirers of the aboriginal analysis know, Downton Abbey is “entailed” to a macho beneficiary only, to ensure that the acreage charcoal complete over generations. If the Aristocrat of Grantham has no son, the abutting macho about gets everything: land, appellation and castle.

That is a abstraction conflicting to Americans, and more alike to the British, who accept afflicted their laws so that a ancient changeable adolescent will be able to accede the British head alike if her parents after accept a boy.

But the entail is the series’ all-important artifice driver. Lord Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), the accepted earl, affiliated a affluent American, Cora, to advice armamentarium the active of the acreage (not aberrant in the 19th and aboriginal 20th centuries), but they accept alone three daughters.

So everything, including Cora’s money, will go to the fresh beneficiary (the aboriginal one accepting died on the Titanic), common advocate Matthew (Dan Stevens), who is so abroad a about that he is a drifter to the family.

Amazingly, Cora doesn’t assume actual affronted about it, and McGovern says she’s sometimes a little affronted for her. She “gave up her country, her past, her fortune, and at some point she has to attending at her bedmate and wonder, was it account it?”