As 'Downton' films its last, a glimmer of hope for more?

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - With just a few weeks left of filming for the sixth and final season, the cast of "Downton Abbey" made its final appearance at the Television Critics Association's summer meetings in Beverly Hills this weekend, and some reporters seemed reluctant to let go.

One practically begged executive producer Gareth Neame for an annual two-hour movie.

(Sorry. Not likely.)

Neame, though, wasn't ruling out (or in) the possibility of one feature-length "Downton" continuation.

"There's rumor and speculation," he said. "I'm not denying anything, but there's no firm plans. I think a 'Downton' movie could be a wonderful thing, but we don't have a script or a plan or anything as yet."

Shooting at Highclere Castle, stand-in for the Granthams' ancestral home, ended a couple of weeks ago, and Michelle Dockery and Laura Carmichael, who play sniping sisters Lady Mary and Lady Edith, reported having, as Dockery put it, "a bit of a cry."

"We didn't want to leave," she said. "Laura and I wandered around for the last time, and suddenly we didn't want to go home. It was really funny."

Onscreen, of course, the two don't get along so well.

"We like reading those great scenes between the two of them," Dockery said.

"Michelle and I both have two sisters as well and are from these families with three girls," Carmichael said.

"And I think you know your sister more than you know anyone else, in a weird way. And I think you know where to stick the knife in. In the case of Edith and Mary, they know how to wind each other up and really do the worst they possibly can. And I think, yeah, there's something that's remained truthful about it, even though it is so funny."

There won't be much of a break from work for some cast members.

Joanne Froggatt, who plays Anna Bates - who will (sigh) not be out of the woods on that murder thing when Season 6 premieres Jan. 3 - begins filming on a two-part British drama about two days after "Downton" wraps.

"I'm playing the lead," Froggatt said, "and it's a true story abut the first female serial killer in the Victorian era. . . . She's a total polar opposite to Anna."

Dockery's doing a pilot in October for a TNT show called "Good Behavior," from the makers of "Wayward Pines," followed by a play, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," in London.

And Hugh Bonnevile will go from Lord Grantham to Lord Mountbatten, leaving the "day after we finish" for India to film "The Viceroy's House," a movie about the partition of India in 1947, with Gillian Anderson as Lady Mountbatten.

And Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Lady Cora?

"Looking for a job," she said cheerfully.