'Downton Abbey' Season Five Premieres Jan. 4

American audiences are more than ready to get back to "Downton Abbey," the fifth season of which premieres Stateside on PBS on Sunday, Jan. 4.

We will have just rung in 2015, but for the noble Downtown clan and their endlessly roiling cadre of servants the year is 1924. Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is considering a second marriage, this time to Lord Anthony Gillingham (played by the delicious Tom Cullen, of "Weekend" fame). Meantime, sister Edith (Laura Carmichael) struggles with the secret of having given up a daughter she's had out of wedlock.

If all that weren't enough, scheming servant Thomas (Rob James-Collier) still has it in for the ever-beleaguered valet, Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle); Thomas is the equivalent of a one-man Republican congress during a democratic presidency, forever fishing for some incriminating bit of information on Bates or, failing that, his wife Anna (Joanne Froggatt), who serves Mary as lady's maid. To this end, Thomas has installed a spy, Mrs. Baxter (Raquel Cassidy), in the abbey; as Season Five begins, that plot is set to either pay dividends, or blow up in Thomas' face.

As ever, social change is the backdrop against which grand occasions and elegant dinners unfold. It's now twelve years since the beginning of the series (episode one began with the news, in April of 1912, of the Titanic's sinking), World War I has come and gone, and England's political and cultural fabric is both unraveling and re-knitting into something new and more equitable -- a transformation that the high-born dread and even the old-school servants regard with distaste. (Head butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) grumbles about life being "flux," a grudging concession to the inevitable that Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), the housekeeper and Mr. Carson's de facto equal, gently mocks.) For everyone else -- even Lady Mary, a cold fish by nature -- modernity has an undeniable allure.

The show's anchor remains Violet (Maggie Smith), the Dowager Countess and mother of Downton's patriarch, Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville). Regal, imperious, and unrivaled in the art of the cutting witticism, the Dowager Countess nonetheless knows where and how to be flexible and allow change to creep in. (There are a couple of scenes in the season opener in which she corrects the conduct of her snobbish servant, a fellow named Spratt (Jeremy Swift) who doesn't care to wait on mere members of the middle class.)

As linchpin and occasional peacemaker, Violet both keeps the fires roaring and stops the kettle from boiling over, as in a scene in which Sarah Bunting (Daisy Lewis), a schoolteacher friend (and romantic interest) of son-in-law Tom's (Allen Leech) insults the Earl at his own anniversary dinner. Violet's one-liner puts the upstart in her place without contesting her position on a controversial project to erect a monument to the village's war dead. Class warfare never felt this... well, classy.

Crawley's wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), an American transplant who has taken rather well to the British aristocracy, is underused (as she often is), but traces of her Yankee heritage show through when she displays an uncommon degree of sympathy and understanding toward a servant after hearing a shocking admission. No doubt there's more to the story, and no doubt there is a kernel of nobility that the servant in question, in reserved English style, doesn't wish to impart too readily. The eyes roll, but the mouth also waters: What pulpy new plot thread is series creator and writer Julien Fellowes preparing to unleash upon us now?

If the first of the new crop of "Downton" episodes is any indication, Season Five will be more of the same, and it's a good thing. The show remains starchy and sudsy in equal measures -- which is just how the fans like it.