The servants are not universally happy with their lot, but they are not oppressed either. In one scene, the butler and housekeeper discuss whether it was worth giving up marriage and children to serve the family. Both look wistful but neither concludes that they have wasted their lives. 

Downton Abbey's message is so old-fashioned it is almost fresh. Edwardian nobles have privileges but they also have responsibilities and their lives are not as easy as they seem. Mary has a one-night stand with a handsome Turkish diplomat, but he distresses the lady by dropping dead in her bed while making love, something that no Englishman should ever do if he wishes to be considered a gentleman. The servants are inferiors but they have a secure place in the hierarchy and masters who care for them when they are sick.

The writing is competent, and the acting and production values are high. I feel mean-spirited criticising Fellowes, not least because I will watch Downton Abbey to the end. But it remains a strange drama because it has so little to say that I cannot see why Fellowes wanted to write it.

It may be unfair to set him against great writers, but the Sunday evening slot and the country house setting invite comparisons and none of them is flattering. Brideshead Revisited may be Evelyn Waugh's most sentimental work, but the old satirist retained enough brutality to destroy the privileged world of the Marchmain family in the final chapters. Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, could not be further from Fellowes's contented servants. The novel gradually shows how he ruined his life and missed his chance of love by being loyal to a worthless master. Isabel Colegate's novel The Shooting Party, which Alan Bridges turned into an excellent film in the 1980s, deftly uses the slaughter of pheasants during a weekend at a country house to suggest a collapse in traditional values as the massacres on the Western Front draw near. Even the writers of Upstairs, Downstairs knew that Edwardian Britain did not bask in a halcyon summer, but was torn by strikes, the suffragette movement and threat of civil war in Ireland.

Downton Abbey nods towards the greater conflicts of the period, but only for form's sake. Women characters occasionally allow serious thoughts to trouble their pretty little heads. A chauffeur admits to be being a socialist with a chuckle in his voice. But these moments are fleeting. The plots remain insipid and the characters feebly drawn. This most conservative of dramas is an artistic failure, and its weakness points to wider tensions.