Clunky and clichéd... but five stars for the lobsters
The Gilded Age
Sky Atlantic/NOW, Tuesday HHHHH The Responder
BBC1, Monday & Tuesday HHHHH
Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age, which has been billed as ‘America’s Downton’, is set in New York in the 1880s and has a tremendous cast, is blissfully and lavishly styled – this would have been awarded five stars had I only been judging hats – but is somehow underwhelming.
It’s the kind of show you want to thrash into some kind of life with a broom. It’s quite inert, dramatically. I’ve watched ahead (three episodes), but you needn’t fear spoilers as not much of anything happens. It is also blandly familiar, with blandly familiar characters. There’s no Carson, but there is a similar butler, and no Violet Crawley, but a similar spiky dowager, and there’s a closeted gay character and even a scheming ladies’ maid, Turner, who is just like our old friend O’Brien. I am certainly minded to write to Turner’s mistress, Mrs Bertha Russell, to tell her to look out for a strategically placed bar of soap whenever getting out of the bath. Better safe than sorry.
The Gilded Age is, naturally, predominately preoccupied with money and class. He must be a nightmare to live with, Julian Fellowes. ‘Julian, darling, shall we go out tonight?’ ‘I think I’ll just stay in, brooding about money and class, if you don’t mind, dear.’ ‘But you did that last night!’ ‘I never get bored of it, my love.’
This is set at a time when, apparently, old money families were trying to hold out against the newly rich who had made their fortunes in the railroads, say. This is played out via an upstairs-downstairs tale of two households, but we begin with Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) who, left penniless in Pennsylvania after the death of her father, travels to New York to live with her two aunts, Agnes (Christine Baranski) and Ada (Cynthia Nixon).
Ada is sweet and fluffy-headed, while Agnes is our spiky dowager, our ‘Maggie Smith’, if you like, but she isn’t given any ‘what is a weekend?’ zingers. Instead, she basically keeps repeating: old money, good, new money, vulgar. She will persist in spelling it out, as in: ‘We only receive the old people in this house, Marian. Not the new, never the new… you are my niece and belong to old New York.’ It’s that, over and over.
But, horror of horrors, who’s this, moving into the newly built mansion across the street? It’s the Russells, George (Morgan Spector) and Bertha (Carrie Coon), who are stupendously nouveau riche. He’s a ruthless robber baron, she’s a determined social climber who comprehends ‘we cannot succeed in this town without Mrs Astor’s approval’. There are many posh Mrs Astors floating about, in hats, and it’s quite tough distinguishing who is who.
There is also a ‘younger set’ that is quite hard to distinguish, apart from the Russells’ son, but only because he’s played by Poldark’s Harry Richardson. (Drake Carne! What have you done with Morwenna?). Anyway, Bertha is perpetually snubbed by the elite. She throws a party for 200, that is definitely a party, rather than a work event, but virtually no one attends. This is a pity. The lobster buffet looked amazing.
This would be five stars, if we were only judging on lobster buffets. This was by far the best scene in the opening episode, but you still couldn’t feel that sorry for her. Or feel anything for anyone, in fact.
This somehow keeps you at arm’s length, possibly because the dialogue is often exposition-y, plain clunky, or a cliché. ‘They own the future, men like Mr Russell,’ one servant actually says. Or it’s George Russell saying: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Really. He did. And the plot, as I said, is undramatic, and in a nutshell never develops beyond:
Old Money: ‘We will have nothing to do with new money.’
New Money: ‘We’ll see about that.’
Old Money: ‘We won’t.’
New Money: ‘Want a bet?’
The characters are, thus far, one-dimensional – Agnes is purely her haughtiness; Baranski is a terrific actress but can’t flex her muscles here – and in some cases, unlikely. Marian befriends a young black woman (Denée Benton) on her journey, whom Agnes hires as her secretary, which seemed implausible, for example.
The servants, meanwhile, are as you’d expect, including Turner (Kelley Curran), although we’d better keep our eye on her. The Russells are, admittedly, a hot couple, but this isn’t sexy like Bridgerton was, or even Downton. Marian is rather drippy and no Lady Mary. She doesn’t kill a Turkish man with sex. But, by the end of episode three – OK, spoiler alert! – she has volunteered for a charity that helps orphaned children.
What I am saying is that it isn’t especially compelling, but it’s still three stars because if you like this sort of thing (she says, patronisingly), you will like this. And the hats are tremendous.
And now I’ve run out of space for this week’s two new police procedurals Trigger Point (ITV) and The Responder (BBC) so I’ll try to cover them next week. In the meantime, if you wish to choose one? The Responder. It’s bleak. So bleak that even though it stars Martin Freeman, it could star John Simm. It’s a police procedural via Trainspotting, if you’re up for that. It is interesting, at least.