Julian Fellowes is offering up another stylish British period drama, and yes, he delivers.
Belgravia, based on Fellowes' novel of the same name and set in early 19th century London, premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on Epix.
While Epix often promotes rowdier and louder fare, Belgravia is a well-mannered, six-part series that would have fit comfortably on PBS, the network that carried a previous Fellowes production called Downton Abbey.
That doesn't mean nothing happens in Belgravia. But instead of ruffians with knives, almost all the combatants here are courtly aristocrats with top hats and the privileges of entitlement.
While it all unfolds a century before Downton Abbey, Fellowes imbues his characters with the same refined speech and a similar litany of what today we might call first-world problems – which turn out to be quite engaging.
Belgravia includes what often feels like hundreds of characters, but it focuses on two families, the Trenchards and the Brockenhursts.
James Trenchard (Philip Glenister, top) is a commoner who has achieved great success as a merchant, supplying the British army in campaigns that include the climactic victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.
He and his wife, Anne (Tamsin Greig, top), gradually work their way up to a tenuous foothold on the fringes of aristocratic society – which would be the best they would be allowed, grudgingly, if it weren't for the fact they have a tragic secret.
Their daughter, Sophia (Emily Reid), died in childbirth in 1816, bearing the only child of her husband, Edmund Bellasis (Jeremy Neumark Jones), heir to one of Britain's great fortunes.
Edmund was killed at the Battle of Waterloo, however, and because there was some question whether he and Sophia were legally married, the Trenchards decided to keep the birth secret from the Bellasis family – knowing that if the child were illegitimate, that sort of scandal could permanently tarnish the reputations of both the deceased couple and their families.
So they gave the infant over to a childless clergyman and his wife, gentle folks who raised him without ever telling him of his true parentage.
Many years later, the adopted infant is a successful businessman named Charles Pope (Jack Bardoe), and for an odd set of reasons, the secret is shaken loose.
Needless to say, his bloodline rattles the world of Edmund's family – notably including his aunt, Lady Brockenhurst (Harriet Walter), who oversees the destiny of the family estate, and is delighted that she has a biological nephew to whom it can now be passed.
The rest of the extended family is considerably less delighted since Pope's existence alters almost everyone else's expectations for the Brockenhurst fortune.
From this premise, Fellowes spins out a complex drama involving paternal disappointment, the dissipation of the rich, maternal guilt, maternal imperiousness, financial desperation, and, hey, that's only what happens upstairs.
There is also, naturally, a downstairs component, and let's just say the help in Belgravia isn't nearly as compliant and good-hearted as the household staff in Downton Abbey.
The cast is far too vast to catalog in its entirety, but viewers may be particularly delighted by John Bellasis (Adam James), who leads the campaign to push Charles Pope back into obscurity, and the mother-daughter team of Lady Templemore (Tara Fitzgerald) and Lady Maria Grey (Ella Purnell).
Fellowes choreographs the sparring delightfully, and the dialogue keeps the storyline purring like a finely tuned, well, okay, horse and carriage.
Belgravia was conceived and is filmed as a closed-end series, following the novel. It has been well-received enough in Britain that there is now talk of a second series. All things considered, that would be jolly good.