‘Gilded Age’ took long, winding road to HBO debut
Lavish period drama series like an American take on ‘Downton Abbey’
Christine Baranski still remembers the fateful evening at the 2012 Emmy Awards when she was seated near some of the stars of “Downton Abbey,” the celebrated PBS “Masterpiece” drama about a British country estate in the early 1900s.
Baranski, nominated for best supporting actress in a drama for “The Good Wife,” left without a trophy, which instead went to one of her “Downton” rivals. “I was competing against the inimitable Dame Maggie Smith, thinking I’d have a snowball’s chance,” she recalled.
But at an after-party later that night, Baranski encountered Julian Fellowes, the “Downton” creator. She had heard he was working on a follow-up series, and she took the opportunity to pay him her compliments.
“I would always be pea green with envy, watching all those fabulous actors in their fabulous outfits doing this period piece,” she said. “I thought, why can’t the American actors get a shot at this?”
A decade later, Baranski and a cast of dozens are getting that opportunity in “The Gilded Age,” a new period drama on HBO.
While not a direct follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” “The Gilded Age” is another sweeping historical series produced in similarly lavish style, set this time in 1880s New York amid the class conflicts between old money and the nouveau riche.
The drama follows a fictional young woman, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), and her new acquaintance Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) into the Manhattan home of Brook’s wealthy aunts, Agnes van Rhijn (Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon).
There they are drawn into the glamorous customs and merciless mores of upper-class New York life and the blue-blooded aunts’ rivalry with the prosperous arrivistes George and Bertha Russell (Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon), who have just built their new mansion across the street.
“The Gilded Age” brings all the pageantry and production value that “Downton Abbey” was known for — sumptuous sets and extravagant costumes, as well as a starry cast. It also carries the pedigree of Fellowes, a two-time Emmy winner for “Downton” and the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “Gosford Park.”
But “The Gilded Age” is arriving after a drawn-out development process, during which it relocated from NBC to HBO, and a production delayed by the pandemic. The series will test whether viewers want to turn to HBO for a historical costume drama in the “Downton Abbey” mold, and whether “Downton” was a once-in-a-career hit or a repeatable phenomenon.
Fellowes, who wrote all six seasons of “Downton Abbey” (a couple of episodes included co-writers) and its two film sequels, knows that these are precipitous stakes, though he prefers to see them as reflections of the runaway success that “Downton” enjoyed.
“The only way people are not going to have any expectations of you is if you’ve only ever written a flop,” he said in an interview. “I’d rather have the big success and see if I can survive it.”
In his research and writing for “Downton Abbey,” Fellowes explored the phenomenon of so-called “dollar princesses” — wealthy American heiresses of the 1800s and 1900s whom faltering European aristocrats married in order to bolster their dwindling fortunes.
That led Fellowes to further reading on dynastic American families like the Vanderbilts, the Astors and the Goulds, and the financial boom that followed the Civil War.
“The fortunes got bigger, the men got much more powerful, and everything was boiling over,” he explained. No longer content to pattern themselves on European nobility, these capitalist barons began spending their money “in an American way,” Fellowes said. “They didn’t just buy country houses in the middle of 40,000 acres — they built vast palaces that were 15 feet away from the one next door.”
But only the men were permitted to have careers and participate in politics. As Fellowes said, “Strong women who were imaginative and full of invention had to make it happen for themselves” — by inventing an implicitly hierarchical high society.
Baranski says of her character, “She’s a marvelous snob, but who wouldn’t want to play a snob written by Julian Fellowes?”
Sets were built on soundstages on Long Island, including for the myriad rooms of the Russell mansion, decorated with periodappropriate fabrics and patterns made by some of the same European companies that fabricated the originals in the 1800s. A backlot constructed at the nearby Museum of American Armor, in Old Bethpage, New York, housed the imposing edifices and opulent interiors that together re-created a stretch of 19th century Manhattan’s East Side. (The show also uses locations in Troy, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island.)
Bob Shaw, the show’s production designer, said that compared to past HBO series he had worked on, including “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire,” “This is the biggest build I’ve ever done.”
But just as shooting was about to start in March 2020, the onset of the pandemic forced a monthslong delay.
“It was like we were about to launch the Queen Mary and then, not so fast, we’re going back to the docks,” Baranski said. “It was painful.”
The delay cost “The Gilded Age” one of its principal cast members, Amanda Peet, who dropped out because of scheduling issues. She was replaced by Coon (“The Leftovers”), who assumed the role of Bertha Russell, an Alva Vanderbilt-like character who finds that her family’s newfound wealth has not earned her a perch in New York’s social hierarchy.
Coon said that Bertha’s snubbing at least gave her forceful character a sympathetic dimension. “The sympathy comes from everyone’s sense of fairness,” she said. “We prefer the myth of meritocracy to an arbitrary rule of exclusion.” Speaking from her character’s perspective, she added, “The world isn’t fair, but you should at least be able to buy your way into it, right? That strikes her as quite fair.”