After Sunday, I will never again see a servant measure a dinner-table setting with a ruler. The sight has become rather familiar to me from the credit sequence that has opened Downton Abbey for the past six seasons. Downton has reveled in quasi-anthropological detail about the lives of early twentieth-century British aristocrats and their domestics. All the historically informed minutiae lent a veneer of seriousness to this handsomely costumed potboiler, a “Masterpiece” series that has become the top-rated PBS drama of all time.

Chronicling the roiling lives of the privileged Crawley family and their servants at an enormous English estate between 1912 and the mid-1920s, Downton Abbey has been vivid, suspenseful, and often funny, but it has always remained a soap opera with pretentions. The success of the show, written and created by Julian Fellowes, was less about artful storytelling than about the exoticism of the recent past, feel-good characterizations, luxuriant visuals (those tiaras! those gowns! those grand-manor interiors!), and great performances by extremely good-looking actors.

A principal drawing card has been the show’s obsession with the passage of time. From its first season—in which the installation of a telephone at Downton occasioned wonder and trepidation—the series has emphasized the fact that the Crawleys’ way of life is passing away. This tempus-fugit theme has pervaded the entire production, starting with the credit sequence, with its wistful music and shots of now-vanished sights (the servant setting the table with a ruler, a bell system for summoning servants). It also accounts for a hefty portion of the show’s humor—“Why would we ever want a telephone at Downton, my lord?” the very traditional butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) asked Robert, Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) in season one, exuding a disdain that, from the perspective of our own phone-centric millennium, seemed funny. In with the new, out with the old. But the old could put up a fight—especially old mores. A scandal almost erupted after Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) stayed at a hotel with one of her suitors: in her sexual adventurousness, she was a little ahead of her time, and so was vulnerable to blackmail.

There was something downright comforting about the conspicuousness of fleeting time in Downton. We viewers live in a world that seethes with change, with new technologies and business models (the internet, Uber, Amazon) threatening to transform or kill off established institutions (newspapers, the taxi industry, the neighborhood bookstore). We cannot foresee where current changes are taking us; sometimes the changes are so incremental that we don’t notice them at all. So it’s reassuring to see various members of the Crawley circle experience such obvious alarm at developments that, for us, are safely in the past. A telephone may have been a frightening novelty in rural England around World War I, but we viewers know it won’t destroy civilization. The sharp-tongued Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith), might be appalled at the notion of doing without a lady’s maid, but those of us who dress ourselves in the morning know that it’s possible to cope with this too.

Almost as soothing have been the show’s bite-sized arcs of suspense and gratification. If you leave aside the overarching matter of whether Downton will be economically sustainable in the long-term—may I suggest a gift shop?—the series was not one to string its viewers along for long. High-drama crises tended to be resolved quickly—often happily, to boot. When the Crawley family risks losing their estate after the heir goes down with the Titanic, a new potential heir, Matthew (Dan Stevens), soon comes to the rescue. When Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay) scandalizes the family by marrying the Irish chauffeur Tom Branson (Allen Leech), it takes only a few more episodes for the Crawleys to decide that Tom is not so bad after all. (Lord Grantham will even allow the couple’s baby to be baptized as a Catholic, in accordance with Tom’s wishes.)

Such speedy resolutions kept the frequent doses of genteel sensationalism (murder, melodramatic love affairs, illegitimate children, etc.) from throwing the show off course. They also lent the show a warm-and-fuzzy quality, which harmonized with the improbable niceness of almost all the characters. The subplot involving the nephew of Downton cook Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) was a case in point. Shot for cowardice during World War I, the nephew (who probably suffered from what we would now call PTSD) was not eligible for citation on a local village war memorial—a sore point with Mrs. Patmore, who had pleaded for his name to be included. In real life, such a dispute would likely have festered bitterly for years. But on Downton, the generous and thoughtful Lord Grantham ordered a separate plaque to be made, so that Mrs. Patmore’s nephew would not be left out. Throughout the series, the remarkable good-heartedness of Lord Grantham and his family, and their habit of empathizing with servants and other members of the lower classes, made the show seem both sentimental and paternalistic.

This sentimentality is particularly apparent if one compares Downton to the addictive period melodrama Indian Summers, which began airing on PBS last year and has been greeted as a possible replacement fix for Downton fans. The two series have much in common: they’re both lushly plotted sagas set in an exotic past that is slowly but perceptibly modernizing (in Indian Summers, it’s the last days of Colonial British India). They both feature two distinct groups of people whom tradition forbids to mingle (in Indian Summers, it’s British expatriates and Indian natives). And they both feature gorgeous scenery and costumes and beautiful actors. But in Indian Summers, whose second season will arrive later this year, the characters are not all people you’d like to invite to your child’s birthday party. Some of them are mean, or Machiavellian, or racist, or corrupt. And their stories are straggling, rather than tidy. In short, while a gripping piece of entertainment, Indian Summers conjures up a world that is arguably more like real life that the green and pleasant land of Downton.

Still, I have to admit that, like so many other viewers, I will be mourning the end of Downton Abbey. The show may have been a guilty pleasure, but it was also a reliable one—like a serving of sticky toffee pudding. It was exotic but comfortable, engrossing but never too challenging. I could sneer at its weaknesses while simultaneously succumbing to its allure. And why shouldn’t I? To quote the Dowager Countess, “I can be as contrary as I choose.”