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.
