The Gilded Age (HBO Max) has had a surprisingly troubled gestation. You’d have thought Julian Fellowes pitching “American Downton” would be one of the quickest meetings in commissioning history. But a version of this series, set in New York in the late 19th century, has been in the works for nearly a decade. It finally reaches us, after changing network from NBC to HBO, as glossy and bloated as you might fear, with a bumper-length opening episode nearly as long as a feature film.
There is a lot of introduction to do, not least because the setting is less clearly delineated than it was in Downton Abbey. Instead of an English stately home, we are in rapidly changing Manhattan. Most of the action revolves around two houses on Fifth Avenue. In one, two middle-aged spinsters from the old-money Van Ryan family try to manage their decline in the face of the rising new money. There’s Agnes (Christine Baranski), the head of the family, and her sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon), who may be in the city but is decidedly not having any sex. It’s a promising dynamic, between two zinger specialists. In one scene of cloddy exposition, you can practically see Nixon wince as she explains how the family fell on hard times.
