Plenty of “prestige dramas” — the sort of programs that get bedecked with Emmy nominations, air on Sunday nights, and are generally seen as part of an intelligent person’s weekly schedule — are, when thought about carefully, a bit wince-inducing. What’s the deal with all the gratuitously naked women and their brutal treatment on “Game of Thrones”? Just how much are we supposed to find Walter White’s sociopathic (and, to some eyes, “badass”) behavior on “Breaking Bad” compelling and thrilling? Is “Mad Men” glorifying an era of glossy surfaces and unlimited whiskey and cigarettes as it pats us on the head for getting why racism is wrong?

All of these are arguable cases. Modern television, by its very nature, asks us to stick with reprehensible characters season after season, so eventually sympathy or at least casual acceptance of nastiness will develop. If people were really to get the comeuppance they deserve, there’d be no more show, and we want the show to keep going. But at least shows like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” are made with an awareness that their characters areantiheroes.

By contrast, “Downton Abbey,” on PBS, is stunningly tone-deaf. The show depicts a group of actual monsters in a manner that’s explicitly loving — and when the facts get in the way, they’re disposed of. “Downton Abbey” is a show about how the world was straightforwardly better when an entrenched class system ruled. “Mad Men” has a complicated relationship with the past, depicting the aesthetics and trimmings as glamorous but the ideology as toxic; “Downton Abbey” is not nearly so complicated.

Consider that Julian Fellowes, the writer behind “Downton,” is a private-school graduate and Cantabrigian who holds a seat in the House of Lords. He has good reason to deplore the changes in the world since the era when the wealthy were entrenched and unquestioned.