TITANIC” Tonight at 8 and concluding tomorrow at 9 p.m. on WCVB (Ch. 5).: C+

How do you top James Cameron’s epic “Titanic,” the highest grossing film of all time and currently back in theaters in a 3-D edition?
If you’re “Downton Abbey” scribe Julian Fellowes, you send that ocean liner crashing into the iceberg not once but four times.
In a twist to trap viewers, each of the first three hours airing tonight ends on a cliffhanger involving the fates of key characters.

Then each proceeding installment backtracks in time from another point of view — several points of view, actually — until the CGI-liner is struck again.
The fourth and final hour, airing at 9 p.m. tomorrow, the 100th anniversary of the vessel’s sinking, flashes back one last time and then reveals who lives and who dies.
As dramatic twists go, it never quite floats.
Viewers are forced to relive scenes already aired from slightly different angles. It’s meant to build tension, but in most cases, the payoff is not worth the wait and it seems like a way to run out the clock.
Fellowes is revered for his work on “Downton Abbey” (which opened its first season by revealing that the heir to the family fortune had gone down on the Titanic), so how can I say this without seeming Anglophobic?
This is a veddy British production — straitjacketed and stuffy.
Fellowes is obsessed with class and seems an apologist for the privileged, suggesting that many warrant their positions by dint of their moral authority and not the luck of the genetic draw.
There were about 2,200 people aboard the Titanic, and he seems to be telling almost as many stories.
He blends fictional characters with real-life Titanic survivors and victims, most notably, for this area, anyway, 27-year-old Harvard graduate and wealthy book collector Harry Widener. In this imagining, Harry has a passionate but chaste romance with a budding suffragette.
While there are no big names here, you’ll recognize several faces.
Linus Roache (best known for his role on “Law & Order”) plays the Earl of Manton, married to the cold Louisa (Geraldine Somerville, the “Harry Potter [website]” films). Annie Desmond (Jenna-Louise Coleman) is the impossibly upbeat second-class serving maid who attracts waiter Paolo (Glen Blackhall).
“Peter the Painter” (Dragos Bucur), a real anarchist who dropped out of history around 1911, seeks a new start in America but finds escaping his past impossible. As John and Muriel Batley, a married couple confronting decades of dashed dreams, Toby Jones (“My Week with Marilyn”) and Maria Doyle Kennedy (“The Tudors” and “Downton Abbey”) are superb.