I love the idea of an intimate epic about masters and servants living in the same house -- especially one that gives their stories more or less equal screen time, and that deftly transitions between them to suggest that when you factor out class differences, we're all driven by the same things. But in rewatching parts of the first series and the first three episodes of this new one, the overriding sense of warmth, nostalgia and comfort started to gnaw at me. Much more so than the original, this very belated, three-part update is a somewhat too enamored portrait of a stratified society that the United States supposedly fought a bloody revolutionary war to escape.  All of which means that, like its predecessors, "Upstairs Downstairs" will no doubt be a ratings bonanza for PBS, which was so unabashedly Anglophilic in its early years that its name might have been an acronym for Prefers British Stuff.  (That said, I wonder if the January 2011 stateside premiere of the very similar "Downton Abbey" -- by Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for writing the very "Upstairs Downstairs"-like "Gosford Park" -- might not have stolen some of its thunder.)

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