The series is a four-part television costume drama created by producer Nigel Stafford-Clark and written by Julian Fellowes to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the maritime disaster on 15 April 1912. It sets out to paint a portrait of a whole society, telling the stories of a wide range of characters, both real and imagined, from every social level. Their narratives are developed and gradually interwoven over the first three episodes, each of which ends in a cliffhanger as the ship begins to founder. The fourth and final episode draws all of the different stories together and reveals to the audience who survives.