‘Downton Abbey’ season 6: Julian Fellowes reflects on Dan Stevens – Jessica Brown Findlay exits

As we get closer and closer with each passing day to the Christmas Special / series finale of “Downton Abbey,” this is going to be in many ways a chance for reflection among some of the people who worked so long on it. No one is ultimately going to be more attached to the end product than Julian Fellowes, and for good reason. The man created the entire series, and much of its success across the board is owed to him entirely.

One of the topics that does continue to tear Fellowes up more than any other, though, is the subject of having to write out two of the most-popular cast members on the series in Jessica Brown Findlay and Dan Stevens during the third season. It’s not something he planned to do; as a matter of fact, he (per the Radio Times) did not learn about Stevens’ interest in leaving until after writing many season 3 scripts, and he really wanted him to at least come back for the start of season 4:

“With Jessica, it seemed right to give her a whole episode that was about her death. With Dan, I had hoped that we would have one episode of this fourth season . . . so we could have ended the Christmas episode on a happy note—the baby, everything lovely. And then kill him in the first episode of the next series. But he didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want his death to dominate the Christmas special, so that’s why we killed him at the very, very end.”

We do think Fellowes and the show have taken too much grief over this particular decision, largely because it is not like they had any other choice on the matter. We firmly believe that if Fellowes had written out the Matthew character in a different way, it would make him look horrible for abandoning his wife and child.