Always on Sunday: Upstairs Downstairs (TV)

It's over forty-one years now that Upstairs[,] Downstairs has been a part of our television lives. We began watching it when Upstairs, Downstairs was first aired in 1971, with all of its 68 episodes hosted by fatherly Alistair Cooke.
It ran until 1975, and our young children started watching them with us somewhere in there. At about age seven, our son was even inspired to write and act in a short play based on the program with his younger sister and two or perhaps all three of the Bates sisters who lived next door.
    The final episode of one of the original program's seasons involved news that someone among the upstairs family had gone down with the Titanic....

Then, after 35 years with no Upstairs, Downstairs—except for a number of reruns, I suppose—Season 1 of a new series began in 2010, with three episodes. Upstairs Downstairs (no comma) takes up the story of 165 Eaton Place in 1936, six years after the original series concluded. The household features its new owners, Sir Hallam (Ed Stoppard, son of playwright Tom) and Lady Agnes Holland (Keeley Hawes), and their downstairs staff.
     Season 2 aired this year, recently concluding with the broadcast of its sixth of six episodes. At about Episode 3 or 4, my wife declared that Upstairs Downstairs had become quite a "soap opera," which term of course comes from rather tiresomely plotted, trashy daytime dramas whose main purpose seems to have been to provide soap distributors an audience of housewives (and househusbands?) to whom to beam advertisements for household cleaning products.
    But I couldn't agree with my wife about this at the time, and now that I've finally gotten around to watching Episodes 5 and 6 from our DVR, I can see that the hanky-panky between Sir Hallam and Lady Agnes's sister...was well designed to play into Sir Hallam's rather sensitive work in the British government as it tries to figure out what to do about Hitler. A little spying, anyone? R-rated perhaps, but soap-operatic, no.
    My wife hasn't watched the final two episodes yet; she is still not quite back to longer-than-half-hour sittings after knee surgery. I hope that my report persuaded her to watch, but she demanded to be told so many highlights that I suspect she'll skip. I won't make that mistake with you.

However, detailed synopses of Upstairs Downstairs can be found on the PBS website (Season 1, Season 2), on the Internet Movie Database (Season 1, Season 2), and in Wikipedia.
    Enjoy! (Either the episodes or their synopses—your choice.)