‘Downton Abbey’ season 6, episode 7: A surprising Maggie Smith admission and more

We are now truly in the winding-down period of “Downton Abbey” no matter how you slice it. After all, there are only three episodes left (and four hours) of the ITV series in Britain, and this means seeing both the happy and sad endings for our cast of characters.

Someone who has certainly had an eventful final season so far is Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess Violet, and that’s probably going to continue moving forward thanks to all of her various conversations with Cora and Isobel.

What’s just as interesting as the events happening on the screen, though, is the admission by Maggie Smith that she has not even seen the show that she appears on. She made the admission on “The Graham Norton Show” this week before admitting that she had the “box set.” While this is a little surprising, it doesn’t know us over in shock. The reality is that many TV stars, including Andrew Lincoln of “The Walking Dead,” do not like to watch themselves because they feel like it distracts them to a certain degree from their work.

Smith also reiterated some previous comments on the show when it comes to how happy she feels at this point that the show is winding down after so many years:

‘I’m glad it’s over, I really am. By the time we finished she (Countess of Grantham) must have been about 110. It couldn’t go on and on, it just didn’t make sense.”

While it’s easy to joke about Violet’s age, we do hope she makes it through the series. Her death at this point would be far too predictable.