‘Downton Abbey’ season 3 spoilers: Could there really be a setting shift?

Whenever a show becomes enormously popular, there are always going to be problems that go along with that; when that very show also happens to be making its location also well-known around the world, then those problems are really increased tenfold when it comes to keeping the perception of a fictional setting.

With that in mind, we turn to the latest tabloid headline surrounding “Downton Abbey,” and whether or not the show was really inconvenienced greatly during filming for its third season by tourists, wedding parties, and other events being held at the famous Highclere Castle.

According to British mag the Mirror, here is what a source had to say about some of the struggles happening behind the scenes with this show:

“The public days got firmly in the way of filming and caused much upset … The irony is that the place has grown enormously popular because of Downton, and yet it’s this very popularity that is causing the problem.”

This source also claims that executive producer Julian Fellowes used the storyline about Downton potentially becoming shut down due to a bad investment by Lord Grantham just so that there could be an indication that the show could go elsewhere and take away some of the business that they have helped to create. Is this really the truth? We don’t completely buy it, mostly because Fellowes is reportedly friends with the real-life owners of Highclere in Earl and Countess of Carnarvon. If the show does move away from Downton at some point, we imagine that it will be so that there are some other interesting stories elsewhere; however, we really don’t see it happening. It’s hard to really have a show called “Downton Abbey” without the Abbey being around, and we really feel as though this whole story is probably getting blown out of proportion … even if we do believe that filming for the show is probably much harder now than it used to be.