Week of February 19: "Downton Abbey's" Continued Success Just Got Trickier

By Sylvia Gurinsky

(You know the deal: If you haven't seen the finale of Series 3, don't read this. There are spoilers.)

With the deaths of two major - and beloved - characters within three episodes, the future success of "Downton Abbey" isn't dicey just when it comes to Lord Grantham's beloved estate.

"Downton Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes rolled some big dice with his decisions to deal with the departures of Jessica Brown Findlay and Dan Stevens by killing off their characters, Lady Sybil Crawley-Branson and Matthew Crawley.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the risks taken in 1975 when "M*A*S*H" producers Gene Reynolds and Larry Gelbart decided to kill off the character of Henry Blake, played by McLean Stevenson. But when Wayne Rogers left at the same time, his character, Trapper John McEntyre, went home off camera, rather than suffering the same fate.

It was a wise decision, and one that triggered a plotline (Trapper didn't say goodbye to Hawkeye.) that would be carried all the way through the end of the series in 1983.

Other than "M*A*S*H," however, other American television shows haven't fared so well when they've said goodbye to multiple cast members at once. "The Waltons" faced the same circumstance when Richard Thomas (John-Boy) left, Ellen Corby (Grandma) suffered a stroke and Will Geer (Grandpa) died within the course of a year. Series creator Earl Hamner incorporated their fates into those of their characters in a realistic way. But ratings were never the same. When Michael Learned left the show two years later and her character, Olivia Walton, went into a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, the show's slip had already started in earnest.

On the original "Hawaii Five-O," Kam Fong left after Season 10; his character, Chin Ho Kelly, was killed off. James MacArthur left after Season 11 with no explanation of the fate of his character, Danny Williams. The show was cancelled after Season 12, just a shell of what it had been.

Fans of "Downton Abbey" in the United Kingdom already started expressing their anger when the plot of the Series 3 finale began to leak and ratings went down considerably for the Christmas Day airing.

We probably won't know until next January how PBS viewers will respond - and how it will affect PBS' fund-raising and sponsorships, which have been helped considerably by "Downton's" success.

But cartoonist Marshall Ramsey had a brilliant - and hilarious - suggestion of how PBS might deal with the fallout:

The Most Successful PBS Pledge Drive Ever

See you next week. Until then, Happy Viewing!