THE GILDED AGE

They say to write what you know, and it’s quite likely no one in television knows high society better than Downton Abbey creator and literal Lord, Julian Fellowes. His new series may be set on the other side of the Atlantic and a generation before Downton, but it’s cut from the same very expensive cloth.

The familiar upstairs-downstairs dynamic is present here, but The Gilded Age also adds another dimension across the road — this is all about old money versus new money in 1880s New York.

On the old money side of the street, we have sisters Agnes and Ada (The Good Fight’s Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon, whom it is difficult to fully separate from her other character’s recent exploits in the Sex and the City reboot), who spend most of their time glancing furtively from behind lace curtains at the extravagant house being built across the street by railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), who’s hell-bent on attaining the one thing their new money can’t buy: status.

Into all this, steps Agnes and Ada’s young adult niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson), who the pair take in after their estranged brother in Pennsylvania goes and dies with barely a penny left to his name. Eyebrow-raisingly for some, Marian also brings along a friend she made on the train. Peggy, a young Black aspiring writer whom Agnes hires as her secretary, is the most interesting character introduced in the first episode, but is also probably afforded the least screen time.

One of the first things Agnes tells Marian upon her arrival: “We only receive the old people in this house, never the new”. Which, unfortunately for them, is a house rule that’s probably going to come under some pressure since Marian promptly goes and gets a huge crush on the Russells’ charming Harvard-graduate son.

For fans of Downton Abbey and period dramas with lavish costume departments more generally, The Gilded Age should be as well-received as an old money donation at a charity gala.