'Downton Abbey' bunch is back

* MASTERPIECE: DOWNTON ABBEY. 9 p.m. Sunday, WHYY12.

LAURA Carmichael knows all about the Jan Brady comparisons.

Carmichael, whose "Downton Abbey" character, Lady Edith Crawley, has gotten the short end of more sticks in four seasons than the "Brady Bunch" middle daughter could ever have imagined, doesn't mind a bit.

"She's smart, she's bookish. I get it. I love that and I sort of read that and embraced that," Carmichael said in an interview during a PBS event in Beverly Hills last summer to promote the show's fifth season.

Edith, she said, has "changed and evolved and lives through a different period, but, yeah, I love those roles that are the kind of underdog and not what you necessarily expect the heroine to be. But I think in her own way, she is one."

As "Downton Abbey" makes its fifth season debut on PBS' "Masterpiece" on Sunday, Edith's older sister, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), now largely over her widow's grief, is once again the one with the fun problem: Which of her two devastatingly handsome suitors will she marry next?

And, oh, how will she decide?

As Jan might say: "Mary, Mary, Mary."

Edith, meanwhile, is still dealing, as secretively as she can, with the living, breathing consequences of the one night she spent with her since-vanished lover (and employer), magazine editor Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards).

Out-of-wedlock sex tends to have consequences on "Downton Abbey," where Mary once had a one-night stand that left her with a dead man in her bed. So, it's interesting that we hear the name of British birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes invoked this season, which takes place in 1924.

Too late, though, for Edith.

Having succeeded in secretly placing her daughter, Marigold, with a farm family on the Downton estate, Edith's now trying to figure out a way to stay in her life, much to the consternation of the girl's adoptive mother.

"She has no idea that Lady Edith is the mother of this adopted orphan," Carmichael said. "So, understandably, she's taken in this child as her own. . . . She wants to parent the child she adopted."

So, naturally, does Edith, and the ensuing struggle may be one reason we'll see less of her as a working magazine columnist, though Carmichael still sees her character as one.

How successful a writer Edith is, the actress doesn't know.

"It's an interesting thing and a complicated thing," Carmichael said. "Because Gregson - this is not giving anything away, but he left her in charge in that sort of weird signing-documents moment [before he left for Germany in season 4 and subsequently disappeared]. So she is successful.

"I certainly think of her as being accomplished."

Carmichael said that she's "dying to do more of the writing, because I think it's such an interesting facet" of Edith, "but this season . . . they're focusing on her as mother."

It's a focus that also draws Edith, who'd been up to all sorts of modern adventures in London before being packed off to the continent to give birth, back to Downton.

Things are changing there, both upstairs and downstairs, where, I'm afraid, we haven't heard the last of the man who raped ladies' maid Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt) and was subsequently killed.

One murder mystery involving Anna's valet husband (Brendan Coyle) should really have been enough, shouldn't it?

Or maybe not.

The way Froggatt sees it, a little suspense between couples is "what keeps a marriage going."

"They're evolving together, and a marriage does, a lifelong relationship does evolve," she said last summer. "You evolve individually and you have to work out how to evolve together."

And sometimes you have to figure out if your husband killed somebody?

"Everyday stuff," she joked. "We all go through it."

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