In this week’s New Yorker podcast, Nancy Franklin takes the update of Upstairs Downstairs as an excuse to go back and laud the original series as one of the highlights of television drama of the 1970s. I, too, fondly remember the series but I made the mistake of watching it once when it was repeated and I found I just couldn’t take more than a few minutes. At all levels – the writing, acting and aesthetically – recent dramas like The Sopranos, Lost, Babylon 5 and my current favourite, Rubicon, are markedly superior.
