‘Downton Abbey’ season 7: Are new episodes, or a feature film, wanted or necessary?

Friday marks not only Christmas Day, but also the final episode of “Downton Abbey” on ITV. It’s been billed heavily as the series finale, but at the same time, creator Julian Fellowes and executive producer Gareth Neame have made it clear many times over that it is not necessarily the end of the series. They’ve long said that they are open to a feature film, provided of course that they can get all of the actors back.

So with this in mind, we have to say that the odds of a season 7 at any point down the road are pretty much nil. The sentiment seems to be that many cast members are ready to move on, and doing something like this without a few of the iconic cast members would at this point be too depressing. We’ve been able to withstand losing Jessica Brown Findlay and Dan Stevens, but we’re not sure that we could anyone else.

As a matter of fact, we’re not even sure a movie is necessary unless there is a great story. The show at present is taking place around 1925, and the last thing that we want to see is to start seeing is an economic downturn on the show. Much of that really started to rear its head in 1929, so we wouldn’t want to see the show progress too much further than 1926 or 1927. We also don’t want to start seeing any threads to carry into World War II; there are plenty of other shows out there that can cover that.

Ultimately, for now all we hope is that the series finale will be satisfying. For those of you reading this after the episode airs, we’ll be back to discuss it further over the weekend.