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In the HBO drama The Gilded Age, the characters are acutely aware that they are in a time of change. As the series opens in the 1880s, a probate lawyer notes that the railroad industry is losing and making millions every minute. One of its pillars, robber baron George Russell (Morgan Spector), dreams of a high-speed line that will transport freight across the country at unprecedented speed. Thomas Edison realizes the once-imaginable concept of an entire building lit by electric light, while Oscar Wilde charms New York’s elite with his wit, if not his plays. That promise, in the air, inspires immigrants, labor advocates, suffragettes, and a growing black bourgeoisie. Yet while “The Gilded Age,” which returns Sunday for its third season, alludes to all of these historical events, its primary focus is on George’s wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon),’s quest to move up in Manhattan high society. Even with the city beckoning, the first season hinges in part on the question of whether the Russells’ neighbor, the grumpy, old-fashioned Agnes Van Ryne (Christine Baranski), will ever cross 61st Street.
The term “Gilded Age” comes from Mark Twain’s 1873 novel of the same name, a political satire about post-Civil War materialism and corruption. The era is often used to explain today’s spiraling inequality. But The Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes, whose earlier period drama Downton Abbey was criticized for glamorizing the British aristocracy, focuses on the allure of glitz. It’s hard to think of another show on the air right now that’s as glamorous or as empty. A businessman’s joke about banks being like women, “panicking over trifles and ignoring the important stuff,” should be crude, but it unwittingly recaps many of the show’s plotlines. Plenty of shows have managed to make frivolity meaningful, or at least funny. But in fact, so little happens, episode after episode, that The Gilded Age can hardly be called a soap opera: by the time Russell and Van Rijn's servants begin passive-aggressively discussing where to place the salad forks and coffee spoons, it's clear that we'll have to make do with leftovers.
Part of the problem is that there were no real risks involved. Other shows about the super-rich, like Succession and White Lotus, show how money is no shield from emotional (or even physical) trauma; on the contrary, the characters’ wealth makes them more vulnerable to it. The Gilded Age is set in a time of dramatic change, and the fluidity of its characters’ fortunes should be a central element of its premise. The anticipation is set early in the series, when an alderman trying to swindle George goes broke in the process and then commits suicide in shame. But nothing of such significance has happened since—if a crash was ever in the cards, it doesn’t linger. By the end of the second season, for example, Agnes’s son, Oscar (Blake Ritson), has lost the family fortune. Oscar, who is in hiding, has spent the series searching for a wealthy heiress to support his lifestyle; the woman he chooses turns out to have her own agenda, with disastrous consequences for the Van Ryns. His widowed mother is suddenly faced with selling her house and spending her last years with her sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) in a desperate situation, while her domestic help is left alone. This plot twist is one of the few pleasant events of the series: retribution for a would-be swindler! And then, in the next episode, thanks to an unexpected inheritance left to Ada, the family's financial problems are instantly resolved. Agnes and Ada's niece are happy that “nothing needs to be changed.”
The show doesn’t entirely ignore the myopia of its characters. In the first season, Bertha is fixated on the details of her daughter Gladys’s high-society debut, while her husband faces the possibility of imprisonment and the previously loving George finds her increasingly ridiculous. In the new season, when Bertha believes she has found a suitable match for Gladys—an English duke whose Old World title will give the newly minted Russells a social advantage—she acts more like a madam than a mother, coldly ignoring the girl’s feelings to seal the deal. But Fellowes refuses to treat this as a weakness, even clumsily turning Bertha into a proto-feminist who starts a fight for women’s suffrage at a dinner party and risks her social status to speak out on behalf of divorced women. The arc of her attempted redemption ultimately rings hollow.
It doesn't help that Fellowes keeps using the same techniques over and over. Even with impeccable
Sourse: newyorker.com
