Fellowes’s ‘The Gilded Age’ isn’t the gold standard, but it’s still plenty rich
Julian Fellowes’s “The Gilded Age” has returned to HBO and Max for a second season, and I’m loving it. Do I think it’s an extraordinary and complexly written period drama? No, I don’t. Do I think it’s as good as “Downton Abbey,” Fellowes’s most popular show? No, even as it aims for the same upstairs-downstairs melodrama and the same kind of historical context. The characters aren’t as well-drawn.
But I enjoy watching it nonetheless, as it sketches the rapidly shifting cultural world of wealthy people in 1880s New York City, specifically the collision of old money and the nouveau riche. Fellowes cleverly borrows plot bits from novelists such as Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser, and he deploys them in service of his own sly and soapy purposes. There are big snubs, little snubs, efforts to buy love with money, and efforts to get money by pretending to love. Some storylines flow more satisfyingly than others, but it all passes easily and, at choice moments, humorously, as Fellowes goofs on the excesses of rich Americans and gives us Nathan Lane as a soulless hanger-on with an absurd drawl.
The best reason to watch is Carrie Coon. She is a force of nature as Bertha Russell, a singleminded newcomer who is married to a robber baron of a railroad tycoon, George (Morgan Spector, also excellent). Bertha is consumed with the idea of breaking into elite, old-moneyed New York, aware that that same New York looks down on her type and will go to any length to keep her out. She is ruthless and smart, and she is not afraid to play games with the big players — including Mrs. Astor herself — or with her own two children, through whose relationships she hopes to gain class footing.
Coon gives Bertha a big, assertive, sarcastic voice and a still demeanor that is undaunted by obstacles to her ultimate goal. This season, she wages battle in the opera-house world — setting the new Metropolitan Opera House against the Academy of Music after she has been denied a box there — by using the kind of scheming that is so clever and relentless that you root for her success despite her naked ambition. Coon gives us a powerhouse of a woman in a world of oppressive men and indirect, repressed wives.
The period details are remarkable and transporting on “The Gilded Age,” too. The colors of the dresses are mesmerizing, as is the furniture. In the van Rhijn home, the bastion of old money headed by Christine Baranski’s tart Agnes, it’s all frilly and fine and warm, with hints of Europe everywhere. Right across the street, the new Russell home is a cold, hollow giant, a testament to Bertha’s hunger for acceptance. And on the street, we see a New York heading toward, but still decades away from, the dense grid that it is now. We tour all of this impressive production design as the characters attend a seemingly nonstop round of tea parties, galas, and, this season, parties at Newport mansions.
You don’t watch “The Gilded Age” to track the bracing issues of the time. Besides a subplot that finds two Black characters, Peggy (Denee Benton) and her editor, Thomas (Sullivan Jones), in Alabama writing about Booker T. Washington, it’s all frivolousness, haughtiness, courtship, and pretty insults. Who will win that opera war, and how?