The Paradise

A spectacularly entertaining enterprise.

Impeccably cast, extremely handsome, predictably soapy and a trifle slow moving, it’s another first-rate costume drama.

For now, though, it’s comfortable, but inessential. The performances blur together, as actors deliver lines in a competent, polite way, and everything is filmed in a hazy glow. There’s nothing wrong with any of it.

Paradise is based on a Zola novel but is redolent of Dickens, envisioning the store as an insular world full of colorful characters, with its sentimental and romantic upstairs-downstairs intrigues opulently packaged.

A pleasingly soapy story of beating hearts and changing times.

If the daily competitions for commissions don’t quite match the savagery of the male-on-male contests in Glengarry Glenross or In The Company of Men, they remain vicious enough to give the otherwise fluffy plotting a little bite.

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.