Fifty years ago this month, Britain’s ITV network aired the series finale of one of the best-loved television programs of the 1970s. A considerable hit on both sides of the Atlantic, Upstairs, Downstairs had already won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series, along with numerous British Academy Film Awards and Royal Television Society plaudits. Further honors would come when the show’s last season aired in America two years later. 

Yet the Edwardian drawing-room saga created by actress friends Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins is no mere award-season time capsule, a curiosity in the vein of Ironside or Marcus Welby, M.D. Rather, the series remains one of the finest TV programs ever made, as watchable now as it was a third of the way through Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. One of the enduring memories of my childhood is listening as Alexander Faris’s iconic theme music drifted from the living room, where my parents watched, transfixed. Some decades later, I have seen every episode at least six times, and I will likely return to the series every few years until I die.