Season 2 of “Victoria” on “Masterpiece,” which begins Sunday with a two-hour episode and runs for seven weeks (ending with what was a separate Christmas special in Britain), covers the first half of the 1840s. The young queen begins producing what will eventually be a brood of nine children, while presiding over disasters like the British retreat from Kabul and the Irish potato famine. A new prime minister, Robert Peel (Nigel Lindsay), has her respect but not the love she felt for his predecessor, Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell).

Ms. Goodwin stays true to her conception of Victoria as a combination of coquettish flibbertigibbet, tough proto-feminist and compassionate, perhaps too-good-to-be-true liberal humanist. She recoils when labeled “pleasingly fecund,” suffers through a bout of postpartum depression, is forgiving of the staff’s peccadilloes and shakes hands with the black American actor Ira Aldridge (Ashley Zhangazha) — an audacious move in that era — when he comes to the palace to declaim lines from “Othello.”

Like a Disney princess, the queen has an almost unerring instinct for the right choice, though the script often stacks the deck in such a way that the choices make themselves. (Victoria’s compassion for the starving Irish is helped along when one of her ministers calls the famine “an inevitable period of self-regulation” of what he regards as a shiftless population.)

Ms. Goodwin is not immune to clichés and on-the-nose metaphors (the constrictiveness of the corset, the sleight-of-hand of French cooking). A too-familiar sickbed scene should not end with the doctor saying, “The fever has broken,” and yet it does. The need to compress history leads to moments that are maudlin or heavy-handed.

But she has a Julian Fellowes-like ability to keep a story moving and fill it with interesting, engaging characters. Diana Rigg, no longer needed in “Game of Thrones,” joins the cast in high curmudgeon mode as a lady in waiting, a harrumphing embodiment of British propriety and narrow-mindedness. Mr. Sewell briefly reprises his touching portrayal of Melbourne, and Tom Hughes is still fine as the broody but well-meaning Prince Albert (a marked contrast to the conceited simp Matt Smith makes out of Prince Philip in “The Crown.”)