It was poignant to note the April 13 death of English actress Jean Marsh at age 90, just when I’ve been rediscovering the classic television series she co-created and starred in, Upstairs, Downstairs. The show, which originally aired in Britain from 1971 to 1975 and became popular internationally, was essentially a handsome soap opera about a prosperous London family and its domestic staff in the early 20th Century, but its dramatizations of social change in a turbulent era were inightful then and still instructive today. Upstairs, Downstairs originally depicted a lost world; now the episodes themselves belong to a lost culture.

The Bellamys of Eaton Place and their household servants lived through the Edwardian Age, the suffragette movement, the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, the Roaring 1920s, and the Great Depression. This history would have been in living or at least ancestral memory of the series’ original viewers – my late mother, born in 1927 to parents born in the 1890s, was a devoted fan circa 1978 – and much of the fun of watching Upstairs, Downstairs is in noting how different things were at the apex of Imperial Britain compared to seventy or a hundred years later. Since then, women vote; cohabitation is lawful and extensive sexual freedoms taken for granted; labor-saving devices make a lot of human kitchen or cleaning work redundant; even wealthy people rarely employ live-in butlers, cooks, or maids; the hereditary, everyone-knows-their-place class distinctions that obtained in the Belgravia of 1910 were obliterated after two world wars, the civil rights movement, and assorted other political, economic, and technological revolutions. Above all, the standards of duty observed by servants as well as gentry toward King, country, and God, which Upstairs, Downstairs portrayed across multiple storylines, have been pretty much obsolete for several generations.

A large part of the program’s effectiveness, as well, lay in its ensemble cast. Unlike many US sitcoms or drama franchises, Upstairs, Downstairs wasn’t built around a single lead personality used as a selling point, but rather a rotating stable of skilled performers taking primary or supporting parts according to each hour-long plot. The English theatrical tradition nurtures in its artists the versatility to play a wide range of stock types and local dialects, so it’s easy to forget that “Mrs. Bridges,” “Lady Marjorie,” and “Captain James,” for example, were not, in fact, living people, but rather fictional characters crafted by professional writers and actors. North American audiences especially would have been unfamiliar with the British troupers playing the Bellamys and their staff, making the roles “inhabited” in ways they’d never be by Hollywood talent: Gordon Jackson’s impeccable Mr. Hudson, Pauline Collins’ reckless Sarah, the ravishing Nicola Pagett as the headstrong daughter Elizabeth, David Langton’s gentlemanly Richard Bellamy, and Jean Marsh as sensible Rose. To them, their Upstairs, Downstairs identities may have just been another gig (and some cast members quit when the gig became confining), but for millions, they are forever identified with the imaginary individuals they brought to life.

In 2025, nostalgia evoked by streamed seasons of the show is less for the period in which it is set, but for the television of its time. Visually, Upstairs, Downstairs looks like anything made in Britain around 1972, but the authenticity of its stories and dialogue has held up well; indeed, few costume dramas made today (including the “colorblind” Bridgerton and the imitative Downton Abbey) do justice to the cookery, elaborate social etiquette, Christian morality, class and gender hypocrisies, and even the casual anti-Semitism featured so credibly in Upstairs, Downstairs. What is remote and in many ways inconceivable for us was, for its makers, close enough to warrant – and receive – accurate recreation. Although scientists say time travel is impossible, a few hours of revisiting the complex, colorful, and very human residents of 165 Eaton Place may be the next best thing.