It is hardly a surprise that Christine Baranski gets all the best lines in The Gilded Age, the expansive (and, presumably, expensive - a cast heaving with Tony nominees outfitted in glitzy opera cloaks and bustles will not come cheap) new series from patron saint of period drama Julian Fellowes.
His latest offering, a long-gestating project originally announced back in 2018, opens in the Manhattan of 1882, as flashy titans of industry and their ambitious wives threaten to disrupt the hegemony of old-monied families who have dominated New York high society since the city was known as New Amsterdam. Every Fellowes drama must have its acid-tongued grande dame, and as wealthy widow Agnes van Rhijn, staunch preserver of oblique social distinctions and derider of those whose ancestors arrived after the Mayflower, Baranski fulfils that role in scene-stealing fashion. The Upper East Side’s answer to Downton Abbey’s frosty Dowager Countess, Agnes “hasn’t been thrilled since 1865”; she declines to attend her estranged brother’s funeral in Pennsylvania because “it wasn’t worth an uncomfortable day of travel to make sure Henry was dead.”
