Well, I haven't read anything else by P.D. James, and it had been a while since I read a proper mystery, so I'm not sure how it stacks up in that respect. I'm not sure that the mystery (or rather -- the crime, since it was much more the characters sitting around as things played and the wheels of justice ground slow but fine than anyone doing any detecting or anything) would have worked had it not been about P&P characters, but at the same time, without the murder-law-and-order plot to hang the novel on, it would have been not super-compelling as P&P fanfic. So I guess the whole was more than the sum of its parts? It really really reminded me of Downton Abbey, which meant that it filled that nice historical melodrama entertainment slot, too. I wouldn't buy it, but if you can get if from the library...

I thought that season 1 was pretty soapy (the Turkish ambassador blackmailing the gay footman and then dying mid-illicit-sex-act?), but season 2 just seemed to replay all the same ridiculous plot twists every single episode.

And, I wouldn't deny that being wealthy and aristocratic probably makes a lot of things easier (like midlife crises, for example), but the various parallel situations just played out so much worse for the lower-class characters (Matthew is in a wheel-chair and can't ever have sex. But William is dead. And evidently only maids get pregnant when they get seduced... And not to mention that the divers romantic angsts among the upper classes are balanced by the main downstairs couple being separated because one half of it on trial for his life...)