'Downton Abbey' Season 5 Release Date Announced, First Trailer Teaser Released, Watch Here (VIDEO)

By Matt Lloyd Jul 18, 2014 06:44 PM EDT

'Downton Abbey' Season 5 PBS Release Date Announced, First Trailer Teaser Released, Watch Here (VIDEO)

"Downton Abbey" Season 5 has received an official release date from PBS. The U.S. premiere of Season 5 will air on Sunday night, January 4th, so all fans of the show can mark their calendars for it. The ironic thing is that the U.K. premiere will happen several months before the U.S. premiere, yet they do not a premiere date set yet.

They have released a short teaser for Season 5 which you can check out above. It's not much, but at least something to give the fans a glimpse into the new season.

Having a January 4th premiere date in the U.S. doesn't shocked many fans as that is typically when "Downton Abbey" premieres in America. PBS likes to take advantage of the fact that there is not as much competition on television at the start of the year. Even the weekend of the Super Bowl, "Downton Abbey" has been the second-most-watched program of the night in recent years.

"Downton Abbey" is a British drama television series created by Julian Fellowes and co-produced by Carnival Films and Masterpiece. It first aired in the United Kingdom and Ireland in September 2010 and was picked up on PBS in the United States in January 2011 as part of the Masterpiece Classic anthology. The series won a Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries or Movie.

The series, set in the fictional Yorkshire country estate of Downton Abbey, depicts the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era-with the great events in history having an effect on their lives and on the British social hierarchy. Such events depicted throughout the series include news of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in the first series; the outbreak of the First World War, the Spanish influenza pandemic, and the Marconi scandal in the second series; the interwar period and the formation of the Irish Free State in the third series; and the Teapot Dome scandal in the fourth series.