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A view of 'Downton Abbey,' from its creator

There were several moments when Fellowes, who won an Academy Award for best original screenplay with "Gosford Park," realized he was onto something big with his story about the Crawley family.

To the list of long-awaited television finales, which in the last several years have included Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, we will soon be adding Downton Abbey. But the way in which the smash PBS series ends its sixth and final season, which begins Sunday, was not resolved in a writers' room. Instead, every word of dialogue uttered has flowed from the mind and pen of one individual: Lord Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning creator of the series.

Fellowes was eager to downplay that responsibility last month while he was in town to support the Foundation for Breast and Prostate Health, a local charity founded by his friend, Philadelphian Shelley Schwartz. Fellowes was full of personality and British wit when I questioned him, despite having celebrated the Broadway opening of School of Rock — The Musical, for which he wrote the book, the night before.

"Life is odd, you just do these things," he said. "You don't think about the whole thing. You just think, 'I must get lunch.' And then 47 years later you realize you fed 7 million over the course of time. Writing is like that. You just think you must write this episode because they need it by Tuesday. I don't see it in longer terms than that."

Fellowes observed that "writers' rooms" are rare in the UK and saluted the "great forbearance" of Masterpiece Theatre and PBS in leaving his team alone to do the show they envisioned. ("When we started doing so well it was less noble," he joked to the amusement of the crowd.) Fellowes acknowledged that he will soon be tested in this regard with his new series The Gilded Age, which is in development for NBC. Nevertheless, he said that he was open to the idea of more writing collaboration, and singled out Matthew Weiner's ability to run the Mad Men writers' room in a way that the "style of the show was never weakened, never loosed. So I rather like the idea of trying it."

"When you have that great committee who are all entitled to stick in their two cents, individual voices get lost," he said. "Because half their notes are not designed to make it better, they are simply telling you how they would have written it if they had written it. I was spared that. And I think that was one of main reasons the show did well."

Fellowes told me he normally writes at a house in the country, in a billiard room far away from the main house.

"Of course you are always interrupted, that's part of it," he said. "Someone says, 'I will leave you alone until lunch,' only to return and say, 'There's a parcel coming at 11,' so it's very much like that."

He chuckled when I asked if, at the outset of the series, he knew where it all would end.

"There was no guarantee after the first series and so I had to write an end scene that would do if it was really the end, and not recommissioned," he told me. "Hence the scene when Robert \[Crawley\] stops the band at a garden party and announces that we are war with Germany. Because if that is all there was, the audience would understand."

That scene, like many others he has written for Downton, was taken from Fellowes' life experiences.

"Writers have squirrel pouches where you collect funny moments," he said. "My father's first memory was going to a garden party with his nurse and parents where a man came out on a terrace and said, 'Ladies and gents, we regret to inform that we are at war with Germany.' He was only 2. When I asked him how he could remember, he said he could only suppose that an electronic shiver went through the company that impressed itself on the mind of a young child. That is where I stole the scene from. I nearly put a little boy in it."

There were several moments when Fellowes, who won an Academy Award for best original screenplay with Gosford Park, realized he was onto something big with his story about the Crawley family. The first came when there was a launch party prior to season one. "Normally those parties thin out," he said. "This one went banging on until 2 a.m."

Then came the ratings for the second episode.

"The normal is, when a network has a show to sell they do big promotion, and as a result you get a high figure for the first episode and then lose people," he said. "It's just too soon to get word of mouth. So show two dips, and then declines. Well, we went up 2 million in the second episode. That was so extraordinary people were checking the figures."

For Fellowes personally, validation came after four weeks, when he opened his London Times and saw a picture of the three Crawley sisters.

"When I read it, it said \[Chancellor\] George Osborne belongs in the cast of Downton Abbey. It was an attack on his policy," Fellowes said. "And I realized then that we'd gone into the zeitgeist. You become an adjective. 'Very Downton Abbey.' You are part of a moment. And it was on from there."

Why do we love it?

"Clearly it's an unfair society but it nevertheless has nostalgic appeal," he said. "We treated the servants and family and village and everyone completely equally in terms of drama. We didn't decide these were important and these were horrible characters.

"If the show had been made in the '50s, the family would have been gracious and charming and servants would have been funny. If we made it in the '90s, servants would have been trodden down and the family vile. But we didn't do either. We don't make the Bates and Anna romance any less important than Mary and Matthew. Most of them are pretty decent types, not bad people, just trying to do their best."

For those who choose to wait until all the episodes have aired, and watch them back-to-back, the creator of Downton will understand.

"I'm a classic binge-watcher," he said. "I get so impatient when I watch just one episode. I can't stand to wait. So I'll wait until the end of the series, avoid spoilers, avoid the Internet and them I am in paradise for 10 days." He said he loves watching Scandal and The Good Wife, and admitted to currently traveling with the second half of Mad Men's final season in his briefcase.

"Don't tell me anything!" he said.

Fellowes, of course, gave away no Downton spoilers, but did say he feels no sense of obligation to give us happy endings. When I told him it would have been nice to see these characters in the context of World War II, he said that aging on camera is very hard to do convincingly.

"You can't have an entire series based on gray hair and wobbly sticks and people who are clearly 30-40 years younger than their part," he said.

And besides, Fellowes added, "You want to leave a party when people are sorry to see you go, and not relieved."

But that doesn't mean we've seen the last of Highclere Castle.

"The Daily Mail is always telling me it's going to be a film," Fellowes said. "I hope they're right; we'll find out. I don't mind if it has life beyond or if it doesn't. I'm quite happy either way."

Michael Smerconish can be heard from 9 a.m. to noon on Sirius XM's POTUS Channel 124 and seen hosting "Smerconish" at 9 a.m. Saturdays on CNN.