Downton Abbey’s Final Season Points to More Equal World

If the first five seasons of Downton Abbey—the British upstairs-downstairs soap opera that will have its sixth and final U.S. season premiere on Jan. 3—were about the structure of class divisions in English society, the last one is about those divisions crumbling.

In this season’s opening episode (warning: spoilers), it’s 1925, and the Abbey is cutting staff, leaving some in existential crises over their professional purpose. Middle daughter Lady Edith, a “modern” working woman, has left the family seat to oversee a magazine in London. Lady Mary, the eldest, whose hauteur has at times seemed impenetrable, uses her status to help her lady’s maid procure better medical care. Lord Robert, the Crawley family patriarch and seventh Earl of Grantham, asks mere minutes after the season begins, “Who lives as we used to now?”