Few things jolt a TV audience like a sudden character death, especially when the show in question isn’t known for fatalities. After a few seasons, “Downton Abbey” fans grew to expect that the occasional tragedy would befall the residents of Downton. But early on, the deaths of characters like Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) came as brutal shocks. The question resounded in fan circles: Why not write the characters out in a more peaceful way? Why did they have to die?
As “Downton” creator Julian Fellowes explained to the Television Academy in 2016, the fatalities were necessities of the show’s narrative focus. “The deaths came when the actors chose to leave,” Fellowes said. While some characters could be written out via non-lethal means, it didn’t make sense for core members of the Crawley family to completely vanish. If they were still alive, it would eventually become strange that they never returned to cameo. Or, at least, that was the thinking at the time. “With the servants, they could go and get other jobs,” Fellowes explained, “but with members of the family, if we were never going to see them again, they had to die.”
Michelle Dockery says deaths were good for Downton Abbey
The deaths of Sybil and Matthew in “Downton Abbey” Season 3 were fairly controversial. It was a combined effect of the show’s immense popularity at that point, the time it took for Matthew and Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) to get together in the first place, and the proximity of the deaths to each other. However, in the same oral history with the Television Academy where Julian Fellowes touched on the deaths, Dockery claimed the losses were actually beneficial to the show in the long run.
“The reaction was huge,” Dockery said. “But it was good, because it kept interest in the storyline — people wanted to know what Mary would do now.” Had Dan Stevens opted to stay on the show as Matthew, she said, she wasn’t sure what direction the series might have taken.
While losing fan-favorite characters can kill a series, “Downton” had built up enough goodwill by the end of Season 3 to weather the storm. Earlier this year, the third and final “Downtown” movie, “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale,” premiered, putting a bow on a saga that’s lasted a decade-and-a-half.
