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• Better angels and online demons: A trip down the rabbit hole of Downton Abbey fandom

This summer I started visiting Downton Abbey fan groups on Facebook.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is due out on September 12. I wondered what current fandom looks like for the show. I thought I might discover a friendly community filled with nostalgia for the series and its period, a party where the tea is always flowing and there's always a biscuit for guests. What I found was both better and worse, a terrain filled with scammers, bots, political divisions, and a community fighting to keep calm and rise above.

Downton Abbey public groups: Hive of zombies

Facebook provides two kinds of groups, public and private. For some fan communities, that distinction doesn’t mean much. One of the best Firefly fan groups, for instance, is the public page Browncoats. 28 thousand members strong, the page offers everything from chat about the show to updates on the actors and future meet-ups.

Downton Abbey’s public fan groups, like Downton Abbey Worldwide  or Downton Abbey Die Hard Fans also have tens of thousands of  engaged fans—23,400 for Worldwide, 13,800 for Die Hard. Posts can sometimes generate one thousand likes and hundreds of comments.

But spend any time at all on the Downton Abbey public fan pages and you’ll quickly discover something strange is going on. There’s none of the commentary about the show or upcoming movie that you’d expect from a fan site. Posts on Worldwide consist of an endless series of requests for likes from individuals who each list themselves as “digital creators” and usually have only just joined the page.

“A big yess if  Downton Abbey still your favorite,” writes the page's moderator on August 19. A few days later, someone else posts exactly the same thing, right down to the misspelled “yes” and the extra space before Downton. Meanwhile the page’s administrators are constantly posting calls for people to like their posts saying we want more seasons of the show.

Things are even crazier at Die Hard Fans, where the identities of those posting are all very clearly fake. “Elon Musk”, “CEO of Meta”, “Mark Zukerberg” all feature heavily, as do fake accounts for the actors from Downton Abbey. Posts here slide back and forth between more posts like “We need 700 likes to release the new season” (which has supposedly already been shot), to weird posts about Donald Trump and math problems like the one above with enigmatic titles like “BE CV BK.2025-R-C-Bbe CV bk.2025-A”. When searched on Facebook, those titles lead to hundreds of other spam memes. And yet here again occasionally thousands like or respond to post.

How does a Masterpiece Theater show about dukes and duchesses become a playground for bots and liars? Also, to what end? Occasionally administrator posts on Worldwide invite people to click a link to watch the trailer for a supposed new season that they insist is just waiting for our 900 likes, which leads to another page where you’re invited to click again, a clear phishing scam. But most of the time they just seem to want likes.

Almost certainly responding to their posts will invite further interaction from the organizations behind them, perhaps in the form of ads and pages Facebook will begin to direct their way. Whether it leads to anything more insidious is harder to say, but given the shady and downright weird nature of these posts and their creators, it certainly seems possible.

Downton Abbey private groups: Friendship over all

The private Downton Abbey Facebook Fan Pages, which require permission from page administrators to join, offer much more of the friendly experience I expected. Downton Abbey Fan Page and Downton Abbey In Depth each have well over a hundred thousand members offering daily posts and conversation about the show. People new to Downton Abbey share their reactions as they come upon different plot twists; others re-watching the series pose questions or point out things they’d never noticed before, like a religious sign above the doorway in the servants’ dining space. Some members seem to take on specific missions, like keeping the group abreast of the actors’ latest work, posting interesting articles about the show, or digging into the show’s costumes.

In comparison to the zombie-esque public pages, shambling ever-forward, hungry for victims, the private Downton Abbey fan groups seem to be thriving communities that delight in the show and in interacting with each other. The Fan Page administrators have taken to using a group-specific Facebook AI; every few days it poses a banal question for the group like “Which is your favorite romance?” While members do engage with it, they do so at massively lower levels than they do the posts of one another.

As I kept going back to these pages, I noted that the members of the In Depth group seem to have a unique kind of care for each other. They offer each other advice, everything from travel to the UK, snacks to try, or how to catch all the hints and details in the Downton Abbey trailers. Members also sometimes write about how meaningful the community is to them. The day before she visited the castle where Downton Abbey was, one member posted, “All of you here will be with me as I walk the grounds.”

The next day that member also posted a video addressed to the page’s administrator, thanking her for creating the group. She’s not the only one to do so. There’s clearly a lot of affection for this administrator, and with good reason. Most every day she posts multiple times—video teases of the new film; romantic Downton Abbey quotes and memes; and lots of likes of others’ comments. It’s never too often, always positive, and consistently engaging.

After my experiences on the public pages, I made a point of checking the personal profiles of administrators and others as I joined the private pages, so as to make sure I was not walking into another weird sinkhole of garbage. The In Depth administrator’s page had lots of affirmations—daily images welcoming or farewelling the day—and thoughtful quotes, all very similar in tone to what she brings to the Facebook group.

But interspersed were posts of a vastly different quality, denunciations of the Democratic Party and other emotive political posts. “The Swamp did not get drained,” she wrote last month, “but the water got low enough for us to see all the hideous creatures residing therein.” Similar posts revel in the idea of the Trump Administration investigating past presidents or taking revenge on anyone who has opposed him.

Unsurprisingly, the administrator was not the only active member of the In Depth group to offer strongly-felt political posts on their personal pages. Other members posted their outrage over the current actions of the government. And yet on the In Depth page they all seemed to show the same warmth toward one another.

There’s a version of this story that ends in outrage or despair. Politics and AI are destroying everything, fandom is broken, Facebook is terrible. But I’d like to believe instead that the In Depth community actually represents the possibility that pop culture fandoms still offer to bridge what can feel like impossible gaps. Maybe the In Depth community members have never gone to one another’s pages and seen what they each have to say about politics. Or maybe they’ve each decided that Downton Abbey fandom is a place for everybody, just as the show itself was about groups vastly separate, some on society’s margins—women; wounded war veterans; laborers; immigrants; gay men—finding family and strength in one another.

I understand that that might sound like a naïve fairy tale, given the world we’re living in. But Downton Abbey has always been something of a fairy tale itself, a dream of progress and social cohesion that we’re still fighting to achieve. And a fan group that has found a way to stay the course and share affection not just for Lady Mary and company but one another in the midst of it all is a reminder of what is still possible even now.   

Here's how to watch the Downton Abbey TV series and movies in order.