‘Downton Abbey’ season 5: Joanne Froggatt on cultural impact of series

“Downton Abbey” season 5 is going to be premiering on ITV later this fall, and for Americans, the wait until January for new episodes is a long, long time. So what do you do until then? Rather than sit around and twiddle your thumbs, why not just read up and react to the enormous global impact that this show has?

We have known for some time that American viewers have managed to completely surpass the show’s average audience in its home country of Great Britain, but what may surprise you now is the sheer mass of people who tune in from the United Kingdom. This is something that Joanne Froggatt (Anna) touches on in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times, where she has the following to say:

“For it to be accepted here is a really amazing thing for us. But then it was the biggest show in Spain, and we have 160 million viewers in China. So I don’t know quite what it is that speaks to all these different cultures and all these different places, but I’m just really happy that it does.”

The reason that this is interesting is that the show has not succumbed to any pressure whatsoever to make the show any less “British,” and to appeal to a wider audience. It has focused instead on just trying to continue being the same show that we have all loved in the first place. It’s somewhat-educational for non-Brits, but you fall in love with the characters and embrace their stories. We want to see them find a great place in the world, and avoid some of the sad circumstances around them at times. This is the same approach that we hope the show is taking with season 5: Focus on creating something great, rather than catering to demographics.

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Photo: ITV