‘Downton Abbey’ season 4: PBS boss explains decision to continue delay

“Downton Abbey” season 4 … coming this January? For some readers, we know that you are reading this with a sigh of sadness. While we’re sure that there are some who choose not to wait and will watch via some other means, but for everyone in America who wants to just sit down and be surprised by the latest happenings of the Crawley and the Grantham families, the wait that is enforced upon them courtesy of ITV and American network PBS has to be somewhat frustrating.

Ever since the beginning, we have said that there are a multitude of reasons why the show is not airing live in the USA, with the first one simply being the editing process. The show is tweaked slightly for America so that it works well as commercial-free programming, but in Great Britain, the series airs with commercial interruptions. There are also issues of scheduling stateside, given that PBS seems to want no part of putting the show up against NFL football on a weekly basis in the fall, not to mention new episodes of “Homeland,” “The Good Wife,” “Revenge,” or any others that typically have at least a break or two early in the new year.

Paula Kerger serves as PBS’ president, and at TCA today, she staunchly defended the decision to air new “Downton Abbey” episodes months after the fact, giving what we feel is a pretty solid argument: Why change things if they aren’t broke? Read it below:

“We have looked at this whole issue of spoilers and thought about how to best steward the broadcast. We look carefully at the [competition] in the fall schedule with that in mind. We look at how we get promotion and buzz about it — and that word of mouth has actually benefited us. We don’t want to mess with that if it’s working so well.”

So here is our advice: If you are paralyzed against reading spoilers about the series, don’t follow anyone on Twitter that could be talking about it.  It takes self-control, but for some of you, it could actually be worth it.

If you do want to see some more “Downton Abbey” news and updates, our advice for you is to just head on over to the link here.

Photo: PBS