For the Downton Abbey Christmas special, Julian Fellowes breaks free of his usual, very English restraint and indulges us with the type of script that has you laughing and crying and wishing with all your might that you had a grandmother like the Dowager.
This makes a change from the two previous series, when the Emmy award-winning writer seemed to thrive in delaying pleasure for viewers of his international success, always keeping the emotions buttoned down and the climax building up.
For the actors, presenting such usual restraint means having to channel a rich private world, bubbling away under the surface of the lines.
Laura Carmichael, who plays the Grantham's middle child Lady Edith Crawley, enjoys this challenge: "I find it quite satisfying. The idea of playing Edith very happy isn't very appealing. It's far more interesting to play those moments like in life when you don't always get what you want."
Phyllis Logan, Downton's housekeeper Mrs Hughes, agrees: "It's almost strangely liberating to have those constraints on you where you don't go around screaming the odds all over the place. It's great to know you've got to get a certain emotion across but in a more subtle way than giving it the full welly."
Brendan Coyle, the warm, but troubled, Mr Bates, adds: "It was a different time, people didn't express themselves in the same way, there was more restraint. That doesn't mean you're not conveying high emotions, as we've seen in the Christmas special everyone's conveying high emotions. The stoicism and the restraint is part of the appeal of the show."
Dan Stevens, who has to had to keep his character Matthew Crawley's emotions under wraps perhaps more than any other character, tells us: "People don't get to play big emotions in life really and in this particular country I think the kind of 'leave it, it's family' school of acting is actually our melodrama.
"That's far less naturalistic than what we're doing. And there are elements of quite high emotion, I think the structure of how we shoot the show serves that quite well, we see two scripts at a time so when we start the series we haven't seen Episode three, let alone Episode 8."
SLIDESHOW: A sneak peek at the Downton Christmas special...