Easter morning in Newport, Rhode Island. Playground of the gilded age, where the great and not-remotely-good of New York decamp to their European-inspired estates for another season of more of the same. Which, to distil this review down to its parfum-ed essence, also describes season two of The Gilded Age. More lavish parties. More Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) pushing withering sentences out of her perennially pursed lips such as: “I like ice-cream. It doesn’t mean I eat it 24 hours a day.” And more internecine warfare between old and new New York – this time over who gets which box at the opera.
There is, of course, the real gilded age, just like we have The Real Housewives of New York City. (Except not like that. At all.) The one coined by Mark Twain as a satirical twist on the golden age that never came after the American civil war. The one the writers of Succession would have torn apart with their sharp teeth. But cast that version aside as you would your ostrich-feathered hat at the end of a long day of chicanery. What we’re concerned with, less satirically, is Julian Fellowes’s top dollar cosplay 150 years on in a turd of a time that’s beyond gilding.
We’re a nation well-versed in the Downton Abbey-fication of the past. It’s our thing. Perhaps the only thing we have left. So we know how season two starts and means to go on. With tight aerial shots of hats plucked from hat boxes. The elite promenading up a pristinely recreated street. Some hot new characters, like the kind-eyed rector from Boston (too kind, methinks, for Fellowes to allow anything good to come of him), on the hunt for an authentic New England clam chowder. And, hello there dear Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon), perhaps a wife.
According to Nathan Lane’s Ward McAllister – who’s chewed all the scenery in Manhattan with his great big Scarlett O’Hara chops and is on to Newport – the Russells have conquered New York. Except for that pesky box at the Academy of Music, which Mrs Astor keeps refusing Bertha (Carrie Coon). “But you don’t even like opera,” her brilliant-slash-barbarous industrialist husband George (Morgan Spector) points out. “The opera is where society puts itself on display,” she patiently explains. (There’s a lot of explaining – or what us downstairs might call stating the bleeding obvious – in The Gilded Age.) The big question of season two, and it takes eight episodes to answer, is: will Bertha get her box? Even if she has to micro-manage the construction of a new opera house – which she totally does and it’s called the Met – you bet she will!
History is a mere trifle compared with such profound struggles. But season two is less – how would Fellowes put it? – jejune than season one. It knows where it wants to go: straight to the top strata of society. The many layers below – such as, say, the 12 million immigrants who came to the US between 1870 and 1900 – get less of a look-in. This is a missed opportunity: the gilded age was defined, after all, by extremes. I may be misremembering the past (I am British after all) but Downton Abbey maintained a more level split between upstairs and downstairs.
It’s better on race. Sort of. Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), now a journalist at the New York Globe, goes on a perilous trip to Tuskegee, Alabama to cover the opening of part of the first black college in the land. Racism in the north also features when she reports on the battle to keep New York’s “coloured” schools open. But this story of solidarity, between the growing black middle-class and Irish immigrant populations, is passed over perfunctorily, like a lady of a certain age at a debutante ball. The completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, rise of the labour unions and the very recent reality of slavery remain simply drawn backdrops.
This is the Russells’ season, and God they’re good. They take on the steelworkers, snare a duke and avert the near disaster of his jerusalem artichoke and truffle soup being spiked by a vengeful ex-servant. Phew! The chemistry between Bertha and George is off the Edith Wharton scale. Still, they remain one-dimensional: made purely of ambition, like the American myth itself. Also the dialogue, in general, is like second-rate champagne. It never fizzes as it should. It takes some effort to give Oscar Wilde a cameo and grant him not one quotable line.
And yet. Fellowes’ conservatism is served with just enough perspective to prevent it tipping over into a complete endorsement of the establishment. Americans go wild for this very British view, as the residents of Fifth Avenue once did, which is why Downton Abbey remains among the top PBS dramas of all time, and The Gilded Age will be watched by millions. We’re not immune to its relaxant side-effects either. The truth is, I started with my woke barometer fully functioning and ended punching the air at Aunt Ada’s cash windfall. How did Jane Austen’s (or was that Andrew Davies’s?) Mr Darcy put it? I like The Gilded Age against my better judgment.
The Gilded Age is on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK, Paramount+ in Australia and HBO in the US.
