‘Downton Abbey’ Ending after Season 6, British Drama could be headed to the Big Screen

The Emmy award winning British period drama, "Downton Abbey" will be ending after season six, the producers announced on Thursday in London.

"I think our feeling is that it's good to quite while you're ahead. We feel the show is in incredibly strong shape...the show is so popular globally, but the danger with this sort of thing is to let them go on forever. The danger is if you run to seven, eight, nine, 10 years, it's very addictive to want to do that," executive producer Gareth Neame explained. "But I think it's more important to us to make a perfectly formed show, in our opinion, that we bring to an end when they think the timing is right and that people will love and remember that show for many, many years to come and not feel that there was any sort of drop off-we outstayed our welcome."

Neame added that the decision to end the show was a joint one and that the final season would include all of the characters. Neame did not, however, reveal how the big stories will wrap up but promised viewers that the final season will see an end to many of the characters' way of life.

"The show has always been about the end of a way of life, of a particular era of history," he said. "That's going to come into great relief at the end of the last season. The extraordinary lives of the aristocracy (of the era), it's all coming to an end, and in the final season you're going to start to see how that way of life comes to an end."

He hinted to a possibility of ending the stories on the big screen.

"Our position on that is we would be very interested in that. It is definitely something we're contemplating. It would be great fun to do. I think it would be a wonderful extension of everything that people loved about the TV show, but I can't confirm that it's definitely going to happen," Neame said. "We shall see."

The producer said that there are currently no plans to make a spin-off either but he did not rule that out for the future. "Downton Abbey" was created by Julian Fellowes. The show follows an aristocratic family from 1912 up to the mid-1920s.

The final season of "Downton Abbey" will air in 2016 on PBS in the U.S. The final season is expected to debut in the fall in the UK.