An Original Creation That Became a World
Downton Abbey has no source novel to adapt, no play to translate. Julian Fellowes wrote the original screenplay from scratch, drawing on his background as an aristocrat-adjacent screenwriter (he had just won an Oscar for Gosford Park in 2001) and a lifetime's curiosity about the English class system in the act of dissolving itself. The series premiered on ITV in September 2010 and became, almost immediately, one of the most-watched dramas in British television history.
The story follows the Crawley family, Earls of Grantham, from 1912 through the interwar years, with their servants running a parallel world one floor below. Its real achievement was treating both floors with equal seriousness. From that single original television series, Fellowes built six series, a 2019 theatrical film, a 2022 sequel, a West End musical, and a touring exhibition. It is a franchise built entirely on the authority of its own invented world.
The Downton Abbey Franchise
Every screen version of the Crawley family's story
Downton Abbey Through the Years
- 2010TV series premieres on ITV Downton Abbey
- 2011Series 2 covers the First World War years
- 2012Series 3; US broadcast begins on PBS Masterpiece
- 2013Series 4
- 2014Series 5, set in the mid-1920s
- 2015Series 6, the final television series
- 2019Theatrical film released Downton Abbey
- 2022Downton Abbey: A New Era released Downton Abbey: A New Era
- 2023Stage musical opens in the West End
If You Love the Upstairs Drama
English aristocracy under pressure: inheritance crises, social change, and the weight of a great house
If You Love the Downstairs World
Servants, staff, and the lives of people who keep great households running
If You Love the Edwardian and Interwar Setting
The long goodbye to the Victorian order, the Great War, and what came after
If You Love Julian Fellowes
Other work from the creator: class, country houses, and social comedy in his signature register
The Definitive Version: Series 1 to 3
The television series from 2010 to 2012 is the thing itself. Series 1 opens on the sinking of the Titanic and the inheritance crisis that follows, and the show found its register immediately: warm, wry, emotionally generous, serious about class without being schematic. Series 2 tackled the First World War with genuine feeling. Series 3 brought Shirley MacLaine's sparring scenes with Maggie Smith and a genuinely shocking late episode that the internet has never forgiven the writers for. This is the Downton that defined the format. The quality, revisited now, is still startling.
The Essential Companion: Gosford Park (2001)
Fellowes wrote Gosford Park for Robert Altman before he created Downton, and in important ways it is the sharper, less sentimental version of the same obsessions. The class critique is more cutting, the comedy darker, and Altman's overlapping dialogue gives it a texture the television series never quite matched. If you want to understand where Downton came from, and what it chose to soften, this is the essential companion piece. The servants' investigation plot reveals information the upstairs characters never receive: a structural joke about who actually knows anything in a great house.
The One to Skip: A New Era (2022)
The second theatrical film takes the household to the south of France for an inheritance subplot involving a grand villa, while a silent film crew descends on Downton in Yorkshire. Both storylines are pleasant, but the film plays as a long Christmas special rather than a reason to visit a cinema. The emotional stakes are low, the comedy familiar, and the farewell to certain characters is handled with less weight than the moment deserved. Completionists will find it agreeable. Newcomers should start with the series and may not need to come back.