TV’s Greatest Hate-Watch Is Now Worth Watching for Real
It has not been easy to be a fan of The Gilded Age. The HBO period drama was pilloried in its first season for its “razor-thin plots” with “low, possibly even invisible” stakes that lacked any sharp elbows and nursed a bizarre affection for its robber baron protagonists—and this was just the criticism published on Slate! When the show returned in 2023 for a second season, I approached watching it as a form of televisual rubbernecking, expecting to delight in watching yet another expensive car crash, only to find myself surprised that the series did appear to be finally kicking into gear by introducing viewers to strange concepts like plots and good acting.
What a joy it is, then, to tell my Gilded girlies that Season 3 sees these positive trends continue, even if the show does still have some miles to go before it can comfortably claim to be the prestige television it has always passed itself off as. Across its eight episodes, the first of which debuts Sunday night, this new season is peppered with twists and scandal, heartbreak and horror—and, of course, more extravagant hats than Churchill Downs has ever seen. Stories that used to feel like they dragged on forever are suddenly moving much more quickly, as befits a soap opera of this kind, and more characters are suddenly facing the consequences of their actions. I actually looked forward to watching each episode that critics were provided, rather than feeling trapped inside the parlor room in which Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) was seemingly imprisoned for all of the first season.
At the same time, I felt a strange dissonance of watching—and enjoying!—The Gilded Age right as economists and historians debate whether we are now currently living through a second Gilded Age. After all, this is presently an age of extreme income inequality in the United States, where the top 1 percent of households own more than 30 percent of the nation’s assets. There are more billionaires in the U.S. than in the next two most billionaire-heavy countries combined—and those billionaires are only getting richer every year. And, of course, the cherry on top is the fact that the White House is once again occupied by a billionaire who has stacked his administration with other billionaires who seem focused on enriching some of the wealthiest Americans while slashing programs to aid the poor. Meanwhile, here I was, distracted by what is essentially The Real Housewives of Old-World Mar-a-Lago merely because it dangles the promise of feathers and Carrie Coon before my homosexual eyes. Can The Gilded Age ever amount to more than an escapist fantasy—and should we even ask it to?
Surprisingly, though, I can report that, with its new season, The Gilded Age has actually made incredible progress toward meatier substance. No longer is the show chiefly concerned with pretty costumes and romances, although there are still plenty of those. Instead, Julian Fellowes and his co-writers now frequently seem intent on actively interrogating the prejudices underpinning the glitz and glamor of the colossal summer mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. Throughout this season, characters are repeatedly and unfairly ostracized or mistreated for their race, class, gender, marital status, and sexuality. And, rather than being merely used for throwaway moments or plot devices, as they once were, these prejudices are now slowly being confronted by both viewers and the characters themselves. Is it right, Agnes seems to wonder for the first time ever, that a white doctor should refuse to treat her Black secretary Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) because of the color of her skin? Is it acceptable, Bertha Russell (Coon) and Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy) must consider, for high society to exclude divorcées, even if a woman’s marriage ended through no fault of her own? And just how powerful are these wealthy women, really, when they still lack the right to vote and can be forced into marriages against their will?
To be clear, Shameless this is not. Although it’s an upstairs-downstairs drama, The Gilded Age has never been particularly interested in the lives of the poor. This is a show where the servant characters can climb the social ladder by either using their beauty—like Bertha’s lady’s maid, Turner (Kelley Curran), who married a rich older gentleman—or their brains, like John Trotter (Ben Ahlers, affectionately dubbed “Clock Twink” by some viewers), who seems on the verge of fabulous wealth thanks to his inventing skills. We did have one scene last season in which rail tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) visited with the impoverished family of a striking union leader, but for the most part the walls of The Gilded Age are firmly built to keep us and the characters clueless to what living in this era was actually like for the majority of people. “Take a ride around Five Points or Hell’s Kitchen and tell me you’re not satisfied with your life,” Agnes says at one point, as if these were neighborhoods that she or the show would ever deign to visit. It’s no wonder, then, that Ada (Cynthia Nixon) spends much of this season trying to convince her servants to sign a temperance pledge of sobriety, even as all her cook, Mrs. Bauer (Kristine Nielsen), wants to do at the end of a long day is unwind with a few German brewskies. Amid this ignorance, are we really supposed to feel antipathy toward one servant character who might be selling secrets to the newspapers about their employers? After all, as this character says, “I like the mistress, but money is money.” Fair enough!
Despite its noble determination to depict the world of Black Americans during this era via Peggy’s career and family, The Gilded Age has always felt segregated (perhaps historically aptly) into two distinct shows where the white world is treated by the writers with much more attention and thought. But that, too, changes this season. In one early scene, Agnes meets with Peggy’s parents, Dorothy (Audra McDonald) and Arthur (John Douglas Thompson), when their daughter falls ill, leading to some delightfully tense moments. (Even then, though, the couple can’t decide whether they should enter through the front door or servants’ entrance.) Also introduced this season with great effect is Phylicia Rashad, playing the snooty mother of a potential Peggy suitor, whose colorism and views on former slaves help flesh out the intricacies of Black America back then.
The Gilded Age has never really known whether to treat its central pair, the nouveau riche but power-hungry Bertha and George, with reverence or revulsion, but it has generally erred on the side of respect even though they are most representative of naked, ugly capitalism. Which is why it’s refreshing this season to finally see the Russells depicted just a little more villainously thanks to their insatiable ambition and greed, which eventually results in fractures between the family and even occasional moments of introspection. “I don’t blame you for being ruthless. I admire it. It’s what we share,” George tells Bertha in one scene. “But I’m ruthless in business, not with the people I love.” Still, I can’t help but think the show would benefit even further from allowing Coon, fresh off her turn on The White Lotus, to go the extra mile as a Marie Antoinette of Fifth Avenue, if only to allow one of TV’s greatest working actors to really have some fun.
Indeed, the central problem with The Gilded Age has always been the unfettered admiration with which the show treats its wealthy world. Whereas viewers of Downton Abbey got to slowly watch the collapse of the British Empire and class system across its many seasons and movies, viewers of The Gilded Age have long been confined to a world where many of these power structures were at their height. Occasionally, Fellowes’ obsession with the upper class has made his work appear rosily nostalgic for this bygone era. Thankfully, though, that’s less and less the case with the third season—there is one central marriage scene that’s stylized as an impossibly glamorous affair, but filmed quite rightly as a horror show.
While any change of pace is glacial on The Gilded Age, the seeds of change are slowly being planted. When they finally begin to bloom, the show can fulfill the promise of the pejorative that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner intended in their 1873 book from which the era ultimately drew its name: Things may look gilded, but they’re certainly not golden.
Slate
