The ‘Downton Abbey’ season 4 Christmas special may not make you cry

We don’t want to make any guarantees there with the title, but hasn’t “Downton Abbey” made us suffer enough when it comes to Christmas Day already? The Brits were rolling into December 25 last year coming off so many great events (the Olympics, a good “X Factor” winner, not being the only country to obsess over One Direction anymore), and then Julian Fellows and Dan Stevens had to go and mess everything up with their whole “Merry Christmas, Matthew’s dead” act. Was it sad? Definitely. We’re still shuddering at the thought of a show without Matthew Crawley.

So what is stopping us from being fooled again? Nothing except for blind hope, and this quote from executive producer Gareth Neame to TVLine that things really could be different this time around:

“The [Season 1 finale] was really different from the second, and the second one was very different [from the third] … What we have planned for this year is a very different scenario.”

Maybe it’s just us, but we tend to interpret “very different scenario” as “we are not going to kill someone on Christmas again.” Heck, last year was so un-Christmas of a Christmas special that it wasn’t even set during the holiday season. If you want to find out some more news on this episode, good luck: It hasn’t even filmed yet, and Neame and company come from the Matthew Weiner school of “We Say Nothing”.

While this Christmas special may not make you want to cancel Christmas, there will be other reasons coming up this season to make you upset … including the revelation that Mr. Bates could be letting loose his angry side again.

Photo: ITV