As the latest epidemic of “Downton Abbey” fever abates, we might take a moment to look around and see who survived it, and to admit that the disease was a bit less intense, and the visions it engendered less sublime, than the first time around. Alessandra Stanley, writing in the Times, pegged this feeling early on, noting of the second season that “it’s a sequel that feels like a prolongation: plot twists are repeated, and the same devices are used in too many scenes.” There may be a limit, despite our love for dinner-dress and gentle British calamity, to the number of romantic misunderstandings, overheard conversations, and lost pets that we are willing to endure. Despite all this apparent narrative straining by the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, and his production team, a third season of the show, which reportedly will hurtle its cast of servants and served into the roaring twenties, is already in production—and even the most disgruntled among us are likely to watch.

Why, exactly, we’re likely to watch has been a matter of wide speculation. I think Emily Nussbaum gets it right, in her review in The New Yorker, when she points to the “aspirational” nature of the show. The aspiration, though, is not a vicarious one for the downstairs crew to rise up and overtake positions of the people they serve, but is instead our own rather unpatriotic desire, as common modern Americans, to live like the titled aristocrats we can never be. (The show, retrograde as it is, does little to suggest that there is anything much wrong with the class system—other than that its rigid hierarchy occasionally gets in the way of romance.)

While we wait for “Downton,” there may be a more compelling version of the same general story to keep us company—one that mostly skips the downstairs part, but subtly skewers the fading British landed gentry, rather than blandly exalting it. Later this year HBO and the BBC will release their joint production of “Parade’s End,” a miniseries about Britons during the First World War based on the tetralogy of novels of the same name by Ford Madox Ford. (The collected novels are recently back in print from Vintage.) The literary pedigree gets bumped up another notch by the addition of Tom Stoppard, who adapted the novels for the screen. It’s yet unclear how Stoppard will condense Ford’s sprawling narrative and baroque prose, but the cast, which includes Rebecca Hall, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Everett, Miranda Richardson, and Janet McTeer, is tempting—and the greatness of the source material is enough to generate especially high hopes.

The four novels—individually titled “Some Do Not…,” “No More Parades,” “A Man Could Stand Up—,” and “The Last Post”—follow the character of Christopher Tietjens, heir to the estate of Groby, as he goes from a post in a government statistics office to a commission at the front in France, where one general remarks of him, summing up both his misfortune and his rumpled appeal, “No officer could—without being militarily in the wrong—have a private life that is as incomprehensible and embarrassing as yours…” The crises in his private life, and in that of those around him, involve a variety of imbroglios, as Ford calls them, dramatic enough to satisfy even the most gluttonous of “Downton” fans: unconsummated affairs of the heart, secret marriages, inheritance squabbles, shell shock, and looming financial ruin. At the center of the story is a sturdy dramatic device that “Downton” has always lacked: a well-defined love triangle with three sharp points—in this case, involving Tietjens, his captivating and villainous wife Sylvia, and his true love, a young suffragette named Valentine Wannop, whom we first meet during an uproarious chase scene on a golf course.

Reading “Parade’s End” for the first time recently, I was struck by how many themes it shares with “Downton Abbey”—and by the ways it excels where “Downton” has begun to fall flat. Here are a few examples.

Villains are people, too. By the end of the second season of “Downton,” all of our favorite evil-doers have been dispatched or softened into bland oblivion. Maggie Smith’s formerly biting character turns grandmotherly, and worst of all, the initially fascinating and lightly cruel Lady Mary Crawley has seemingly been focus-grouped into a kind of dead-eyed, forlorn maidenhood. We may be relieved that she finds love at last, but it comes at the cost of all her moxie.

Those who want to spend some time in the company of a real “uppity minx” (as Mary is once referred to on the show) will be pleased to meet Sylvia Tietjens, a beautiful and scornful villain of the first order, whose mild reformation by the end of the story does nothing to blunt her prickly thorns. She throws plates at her husband, admits to hating her child, and, in a monologue of icy brilliance, delivers the ur-text on a kind of feminine power:

Someone, she knew, had once said of a dangerous woman, that when she entered the room every woman kept her husband on the leash. It was Sylvia’s pleasure to think that, before she went out of that room, all the women in it realised with mortification—that they needn’t! For if coolly and distinctly she had said on entering: ‘Nothing doing!’ as barmaids will to the enterprising, she couldn’t more plainly have conveyed to the other women that she had no use for their treasured rubbish.

We never root for Sylvia, but, like her tortured husband, we are a bit in awe, and still love her.

I’ve never met a sword I wouldn’t fall upon. The residents of Downton, both upstairs and down, cloister their thoughts to the point where, as Emily Nussbaum notes, we may have seen one “dignified refusal” too many. The Earl of Grantham and his valet Mr. Bates, for example, have been locked in a two-season contest to see whose upper lip is the stiffest, with Bates taking the top prize for his repeated refusals to defend himself against innuendo and other accusations. Watching Bates shuffle to and from Downton in cycles of exile and redemption quickly becomes a bore.