Yeah, it's not groundbreaking stuff (didn't the original Upstairs Downstairs also involve losing loved ones on the Titanic?), but there's a place for this sort of thing when it's carried off this well. Its biggest drawback was that I really didn't (and don't) give a damn what happens to Mary or Edith, and only Bonneville's sympathetic performance keeps me from thinking that breaking the damn place up will be better for everybody in the long run.
A few too many tidy summing-up bits and plays for audience sympathy (and the outbreak of war was the other shoe you waited all series for), but the characterizations were mostly well laid-out and believable (though giving Bonneville's character the line about the "poor wretches" in the bowels of the doomed ship was just one example where the urge for 21st-century PC seemed to intrude).
Very well-cast, with almost uniformly strong performances, and some choice eye candy (for me, at least) in the persons of Jessica Brown-Findlay and Joanne Froggatt.
And if they're not sticking Smith's name on an Emmy statue right now... well, they're stupid, but we knew that. My god, what that woman can convey with the raise of one eyebrow. "What is a... weekend?"
