HBO’s stuffy, disappointing “The Gilded Age” has moments of grace embedded in its lavish, detailed production design and rich ensemble. However, before the end of the first episode, which runs a jaw-dropping 80 minutes, the show starts to feel like a hollow exercise in style more than the character study it should be. Oscar-winner Julian Fellowes has been working on this production for a decade (and gets co-writer credit with Sonja Warfield), once imagining it as a prequel to his smash hit “Downton Abbey,” and originally planning it for NBC. It feels like all the years of research and production shifts, including a long one due to the pandemic, have sucked the air out of the project. There’s no spontaneity and everything feels as overly polished and carefully considered as the banisters in the homes of the show’s wealthy characters. A few phenomenal performers keep it from disaster, but it’s the kind of show that lacks the teeth to really say or do anything beyond a history lesson that only makes one want to research the time period instead of watching a fictional version of it.
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That’s because one can easily see what drew Fellowes to this era, and even how it could be timely to the one unfolding today. The show takes place in 1882 in New York City, a period of massive cultural upheaval in terms of wealth and power. Business in this country was changing, and so were displays of opulence and social standing. How people show off their place in this world and how drastically that can change with generational differences is the soil in which Fellowes tries to plant his drama. The late-19th century was the time when massive amounts of money really started flowing through the country, reshaping it and defining the gaps between the haves and have-nots in a way that would turn them into chasms today. Naturally, this leads to a lot of discussion of power—who has it, who needs it, and who is going to be denied it—which almost makes “The Gilded Age” work as “Succession: 1882,” although it’s more likely to hit its target audience if it’s advertised as “Downton Abbey: America.”
The drama starts by taking all the power away from one of its central characters, Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobson), whose father has just died and left her penniless in Pennsylvania. Much to her surprise, her dad had almost nothing to his name, leaving Marion with only $30 in total assets. It forces her to move to New York, where her aunts live in a gorgeous home near Central Park. They’re old money, known in the community and set in their ways, particularly Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who has very strict rules about what is and isn’t allowed in her home. Although she does make the progressive move of hiring Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) to be her secretary after Peggy saves Marion’s skin by helping her get home. Peggy is a confident young Black woman in 1882 New York City, a character that allows Fellowes some examination of racial dynamics in the country at this time, but too much of it feels shallow and simplistic, at least at the beginning of the series.
Fellowes seems more interested in the lives of the rich white people near the park, including Agnes’ kinder sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon), and, most of all, the new neighbors to Marion’s aunts. In this show’s “Upstairs, Downstairs” dynamic, the contrast to Agnes and Ada are the Russell family, who have just moved in across the street after building a lavish residence for months, and not using the same workers as most people on the block. Even the people who built the Russell home aggravate the old money in the neighborhood, much less the new residents themselves.
Those residents include patriarch George (Morgan Spector), an ambitious businessman who wants no less than to restructure the entire transportation system of the country with new rail lines and stations. George is ruthless—the way he protects his wife when she feels socially slighted over a charity event or nearly bankrupts his enemies in the third episode make this clear—and it’s hard to tell if “The Gilded Age” sees him as a predator to be admired or a sociopath who should be feared. At its best, the answer is maybe a little bit of both, and Spector deftly sells that take-no-prisoners aspect of his character, one who will do whatever it takes for his plans to come to fruition and for his family to achieve the status he thinks they deserve, even if it turns them into social pariahs.
Spector’s wife Bertha is played by the phenomenal Carrie Coon, an actress who can make nearly any project worth watching on her own. In Bertha, she’s found a character who wants desperately to fit into the elite crowd but isn’t willing to sacrifice an ounce of her freedom of expression to do so. She’s the kind of person who walks into a party expecting everyone to know her already, and the old guard into which struts in the first few episodes of the series recoils at her showiness and confidence. Coon nails the type who needs to be liked but isn’t willing to give an inch to make that happen.
It’s easy to watch actresses as talented as Coon and Baranski dig into their characters, but “The Gilded Age” often gets distracted by its less interesting ensemble members. Jacobson lacks the presence to be what is basically the lead of this show, the eyes and ears for the audience as the outsider into this lavish world. Benton’s subplots feel underwritten, as do the ones involving the charismatic Oscar van Rhijn (Blake Ritson), forced to hide his sexuality in a world that demands a rich son of a wealthy family marry and start one of his own. How societal shifts like the ones represented by Agnes and Bertha impacted gay and Black people in the city at the same time feels rich for a prestige drama, but that material here comes across as footnotes instead of a realistic centerpiece. These are the characters that need to feel more urgent and wanting than the rich white ones in the palatial estates, but every character carries that same highly stylized voice wherein one can tell they were all written by the same person.
Perhaps it’s because it was originally set up as a network drama prequel to a PBS series, but “The Gilded Age” simply lacks bite. It’s a “costume drama” that gets the first part beautifully right but smothers the drama part of that description with airs of pretense and perfection. Like so many artifacts of this year, it looks great but carries no weight. [C-]
“The Gilded Age” premieres on HBO on January 24.