'Downton Abbey' Series Finale: 'Overwhelmingly We Supply a Pretty Happy Ending'

Downton Abbey‘s penultimate episode was one full of drama, from Edith and Mary’s blowup six seasons in the making to Barrow’s attempted suicide, but fans should expect to shed a different kind of tear when the series finale airs Sunday on Masterpiece on PBS. “I think there’s always been lots of twist and turns in Downton, and lots of people have very tragic news and sad news — that their estranged from their children, or illness, or death. And yet, the overall direction of travel of the show is a positive one,” executive producer Gareth Neame tells Yahoo TV. “I think it felt right, even though you got some sad stories, like Carson’s health declining, that overwhelmingly we supply a pretty happy ending.”


Does that mean Poor Edith will get one, even after Mary forced her to tell Bertie that Marigold was hers — an omission that made Bertie call off their engagement because he felt he couldn’t trust Edith? Can viewers forgive Mary?

“We did debate it for a while,” Neame says of Mary’s reveal, “because we thought it was really such an unbelievably bitchy thing for Mary to do. We just thought, ‘Would this be a step too far for the character?’ I thought very strongly no, that Mary’s a robust enough character and we quite like it when she is very, very tough. She’s a snob, and she’s selfish and opinionated. She’s been pretty bad towards her sister. To [reveal that] final massive bombshell, it really makes the characters in the scene just all stop and there’s silence in the room. Every time we watched it — when we were making it and editing it — there was silence in the room. It had the same effect on us as viewers.”