"Upstairs Downstairs"

The search for the perfect home leads the couple to 165 Eaton Place, which hasn’t held up well, acquiring about 40 years’ worth of dirt and disrepair in a fraction of the time. Lady Agnes is nevertheless enchanted and sets about bossing workmen around in an extreme makeover. Sir Hallam’s opinionated and eccentric mother, Lady Maud (Dame Eileen Atkins), moves in for a permanent stay, after decades of living abroad. She brings along her aide, Amanjit Singh (Art Malik), and her pet monkey, Solomon. Lady Agnes’s conniving sister, Lady Persephone (Claire Foy), also arrives and immediately causes a ruckus.

For her domestic staff, Lady Agnes turns to an employment agency run by Mrs. Buck. That would be the same Mrs. Buck who toiled for the Bellamys as a parlormaid, the same Mrs. Buck played by the same Jean Marsh who co-created and starred in the original series and now acts as a bridge between eras.

 

Mrs. Buck takes the housekeeper job herself and assembles a staff, and thus “Upstairs Downstairs” sets about reaching for something that’s unfortunately no longer there. In a way, this sense of the fleeting has always been the narrative subtext of such tales — not only in the original “Upstairs Downstairs” but also in “Downton Abbey” and a hundred other period dramas: Those who serve and those who are served struggle to absorb the subtle social upheavals around them. As before, this is a story about employers and employees remaining affectionately and emotionally codependent on one another, safe within the fortress of proper English manners.

 

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Producing “Upstairs Downstairs,” one of the most beloved series in PBS history, apparently is not like riding a bicycle.

It takes time to remember how.

So this second season of the show’s reincarnation turns out to be markedly more entertaining than the first. It’s got a better, more engaging story and just generally has its rhythm back.

The story has moved forward to the late 1930s and the focal point, the only point really, is the winds of war.

That shakes up life at 165 Eaton Place, the setting of “Upstairs” since the original production four decades ago.

The new proprietors, Sir Hallam (Ed Stoppard) and Lady Agnes (Keeley Hawes), were never designed to carry the series themselves, and they’ve had help all along from edgier characters like Agnes’ sister Persie (Claire Foy), who sympathizes and consorts with Nazis.

This season they get even more help, from a brigade of fictional and real-life historical figures that include an unsympathetic Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and the playboy Duke of Kent.

  

Maybe a thousand previous dramas have tackled England in the 1930s. “Upstairs Downtairs” uses its strength, a large cast with a wide range of back stories, to tackle the bitter and life-changing internal conflicts that almost ripped England apart before Hitler’s bombs fused it back together.

Alex Kingston plays a particularly gripping role as Dr. Blanche Mottershead, who tries to convince a suspicious world that it must help Jews get out of Germany while they still can.

It’s gripping stuff, seamlessly blending the larger tension of the world with the smaller dramas back at 165 Eaton.

PBS has said this will be the last season for the new “Upstairs.” If so, it looks to be going out well.