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.)

(via ‘The Paradise,’ a British Period Drama, Comes to PBS – NYTimes.com)