If soap opera could be sold by the yard, “The Paradise” would be a bolt of beaded polyester chiffon. It’s not silk, but if you’re looking for something a little sexy on a budget, it’ll do.

Set in the fictional department store of the title in northern England, at an indeterminate time when women are buttoned into dresses and deliveries are made by handcart, it’s the kind of shamelessly artificial show in which an episode revolves around the discovery of a foundling in ladies’ wear. Its methods are clear in the opening minutes when the spunky country girl Denise (Joanna Vanderham) arrives in the city and locks eyes — through the Paradise’s plate-glass window — with a stubbled cutie who happens to be the store’s owner. It may look like a coincidence, but in this story, nothing is left to chance.

The eight-episode first season of “The Paradise” was shown on the BBC a year ago and arrives here Sunday night (on PBS’s “Masterpiece Classic”) feeling like a straggler. It’s the last of the big-four British costume dramas of recent years to make its American public-television debut, after “Downton Abbey,” “Call the Midwife” and “Mr. Selfridge,” and it’s the most frivolous of the bunch, which is saying quite a bit. (It’s based, incongruously enough, on a novel by the great French naturalist Émile Zola.)