In HBO's "The Gilded Age," Julian "Downton Abbey" Fellowes transfers his interest in rich people and the people who serve them from early 20th-century England to late 19th-century New York. Once again, it's an upstairs-downstairs, extravagantly dressed soap opera set against a background of social change, as a self-styled aristocracy enamored of its own blood clashes with modernity, including a younger generation less interested in their parents' way of doing things.
Louisa Jacobson (the third actress daughter of Meryl Streep) plays Marian, whom we meet in rural Pennsylvania, learning that all that's left of her late father's estate is $30. Having nowhere to live and nothing to live on, or any evident skills or prospects, she heads to New York City and the protection of her aunts Agnes (Christine Baranski) and Ada (Cynthia Nixon), from whom she has been estranged. (It's like "Cold Comfort Farm" in reverse.) Setting off, her purse, money and tickets are stolen; she is lent train fare by Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a Black woman from Brooklyn whose business in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is left an undiscussed mystery through the five episodes (of nine) out for review.
The narrative convenience of a storm shutting down ferry service to Brooklyn, combined with Marian's indebtedness and good soul and the fact that for some reason Peggy is loath to return to her parents' house, brings them together to her aunts' Fifth Avenue mansion. Here, having displayed excellent penmanship, knowledge of shorthand and an educational pedigree, Peggy — who wants to be a writer, like Jo in "Little Women" — becomes the secretary of Aunt Agnes, a widow whose riches, Agnes likes to point out to Ada, were "not achieved at no cost to myself," while Ada was allowed to lead "the pure and tranquil life of a spinster."
