Given the success of Downton Abbey, it is perhaps only natural that showrunner Julian Fellowes should return to the subject and era that made him famous. Still, it is difficult to watch The Gilded Age, Fellowes’s lavish and absorbing new HBO drama, without sniffing a hint of obsession. Just as a crucial Downton Abbey plot hinged on a newspaper magnate’s quest for elite favor, The Gilded Age follows a pair of nouveaux riches from the ignominy of “trade” to the center of patrician society. Just as Fellowes’s 2020 effort Belgravia considered the costs of such a journey, the showrunner’s latest contemplates what it profits a man to gain the social world but lose his soul.
The duo at the heart of The Gilded Age’s pecuniary morality tale is Bertha and George Russell, a prosperous couple who have recently migrated from 30th Street to the corner of East 61st Street and Fifth Avenue. As the crow flies, such an odyssey is a mere three dozen blocks, a passage of no great moment for a husband and wife of terrific means. In the Manhattan of 1882, however, the expedition represents a chance to trade gauche companions for such luminaries as Caroline Astor, the prominent upper-cruster without whose approval, Bertha assures her husband, “we cannot succeed in this town.”
As played by Carrie Coon (Fargo, The Leftovers), a television actress of rare subtlety and skill, Bertha is as steel-spined and headstrong as a Victorian governess. Having constructed a ballroom of epic scale, Bertha delays her daughter’s coming out until the family is sufficiently popular to draw the right guests. George, meanwhile, as played by Morgan Spector (The Plot Against America), sees life as a game of both social advancement and cold-blooded conquest. Concerned that his wife has been given the cold shoulder at a weeklong charity bazaar, George buys up all the merchandise and ends the festivities in an hour. Accused of scuffing a desk once owned by King Ludwig of Bavaria, he utters the unspoken motto of graspers the world over: “He had it once. I’ve got it now.”
Serving as foils for the ambitious Russells are a collection of snobs and blue bloods as haughty as any crowd that Fellowes has yet assembled. Alderman Patrick Morris (Michel Gill), for instance, would rather betray his social inferior than assist George in a lucrative business venture. Nearly as brazen are sisters Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon) and Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who pointedly refuse to attend Bertha’s housewarming soiree despite residing just across the street from the urban palace of the Russells. At times, the tensions engendered by these divisions are played for laughs, and Baranski proves a worthy heir to Downton Abbey’s Maggie Smith as the queen of poisonous one-liners. Elsewhere, however, the series is not shy about the darker consequences of class conflict. Having caught the alderman in an act of naked treachery, George sets about burning the man’s entire life to the ground.
Ever the master of narrative tone, Fellowes has gathered between these comic and tragic poles an assortment of subplots designed to set The Gilded Age on gentler ground. The most important of these storylines concerns Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), the penniless niece of Ada and Agnes who must navigate New York’s social shores despite her egalitarian beliefs. Another follows a young black fiction writer (Denee Benton) who takes a position as Agnes’s amanuensis in order to escape an overbearing father. Because The Gilded Age, like Downton Abbey, is essentially an exquisitely made soap opera, Fellowes can’t resist placing his young female characters in the path of romance. For Marian, intrigue arrives in the person of Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel), a determined but impoverished attorney. For Bertha’s put-upon daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), an altogether different possibility awaits. Within the neighboring household resides Agnes’s son Oscar (Blake Ritson), a closeted gay man and a shameless chaser of fortunes. The Russells may not be respected by their old-money acquaintances, but their superior balance sheets are very much worth the pursuit.
Among Fellowes’s most significant screenwriting gifts is his ability to juggle large casts without sacrificing clarity or momentum. Thus are The Gilded Age’s two households of servants as sharply drawn and instantly distinguishable as anyone upstairs. A standout scene, for example, sees the van Rhijn butler (Simon Jones) instructing his Russell counterpart (Jack Gilpin) on the proper placement of knives and spoons. The exchange might have been played as an exercise in professional humiliation, but what transpires is at once milder and more interesting. Let New York’s elite jockey for position in a ceaseless race to the top. The servant classes had better stick together.
Yet despite its occasional moments of graciousness, The Gilded Age seems poised to deliver its striving leads into far bleaker pastures, a passage that will be familiar to readers of The Great Gatsby or observers of the political career of former President Donald Trump. As literature and life have repeatedly shown, the outsider’s inward journey can be a source of endless fascination. There is, however, nearly always a reckoning.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
