‘Downton Abbey’ season 4: The ‘alternate’ storyline for Michelle Dockery’s Mary

We know that “Downton Abbey” season 4 is already in production, and just about everyone involved is hard at work trying to ensure that the best product possible ends up on the screen.

So what will that particular storyline be this year? In reality, what we know is that Mary (Michelle Dockery) is going to have a new love interest, there are interesting developments ahead for Edith (Laura Carmichael), and that we are also set to meet the first black character in the cast. However, would you prefer there to be a storyline that is much more of a Shakespearean tragedy, we have something just from you from earlier in the day.

If you head on over to the New Yorker, you can see a biting new piece of satire by John Kenney that takes a pretty horrifying look at what the season premiere could really be: a sequence of characters dying, and of no one at the Abbey really getting all that upset about it. From the standpoint of hyperbole, it’s pretty funny; we all know that death seemed to play a surprisingly large role in the season 3 storyline, but it was due more to the demands of the actors than any sort of perverse pleasure that executive producer Julian Fellowes received out of trying to kill some of these characters off.

On the flip side, we do think that the piece is a little unfair to the notion that these characters are unsympathetic towards death. The time jump is a frequently-used device in the series, and we have not yet had a chance to see how Mary and the others are going to even react to Matthew’s passing. There will be a jump of months between the Christmas special and the season 4 premiere, largely so that Mary and the other characters will have an opportunity to be in a somewhat different place that is not solely one of mourning.

Do you want to see what Laura Carmichael and Allen Leech have to say about what is coming up for season 4? If so, all you have to do is visit the story over here.

Photo: ITV