Where Have I Seen This Before?
The Gilded Age, a little Downton Abbey, and Notions of Style over Substance
Ballroom antics; Courtesy of Backstage.com
Anyone who seeks to know me or knows me already should know that I love Downton Abbey. The series, which aired from 2010 to 2015 on BBC/ITV in the U.K., chronicles the lives of the Crawley family, their servants, and various other affiliates who mostly lived in or close by to the show’s namesake house. During its original run, the show garnered enormous international viewership and numerous accolades for its depiction of fictionalized and heavily dramatized aristocratic life in England at the turn of the 20th century. Beginning with the sinking of the Titanic in 1911, the show includes the First World War and ends in 1920. Its successor films, hardly substitutes for the series, have generated massive revenue since the end of the show’s sixth season and have continued to build on the series’ legacy. At the helm of this mighty franchise is Julian Fellowes, an Englishman whose most famous work prior to Downton was Gosford Park, a murder mystery film which he wrote. Downton can hardly be categorized under the same umbrella, though the show does contain some murder and some mystery. I first watched this show in 2012 as the third season was being broadcast in the U.S. I was 13, and in search of a new adventure. Fellowes offered me one, and thanks to his series, I discovered an auteur unlike any I had encountered before.
Unfortunately, we aren’t here to discuss Downton Abbey, which I hesitate to say is my favorite show of all time (I’m ambivalent about this statement as Amazon Prime’s Fleabag is also a contender for the title). We’re here to discuss the erstwhile auteur’s large scale follow up, HBO Max’s The Gilded Age. Set in 1882 New York City, the series focuses on a large cast of point-of-view characters with special attention paid to its strongest women. Meryl Streep’s daughter, whose name I cannot remember likely owing to the fact that her surname does not match her mother’s, plays a young, idealistic, progressive woman from Pennsylvania who journeys to New York to live with her recently deceased father’s sisters, Aunt Agnes (who has a secretly gay son, Oscar) and Aunt Ada (Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon, respectively). She quickly befriends Peggy Scott (played by Denée Benton), a young black journalist from Brooklyn whose past begins as a mystery to us before its slow reveal ensues in the middle of the season. Thanks to Meryl Streep’s daughter’s character, Ms. Scott begins work for Aunt Agnes as a secretary and moves into the house. She lives and eats amongst the servants, who all become fascinated by a family that has recently finished construction of a massive house across the street from Aunt Agnes’s own. That family, the Russells, are a nuclear unit composed of a railway tycoon father, a social climbing mother (played by Carrie Coon, the alliteration of which inordinately pleases me and will be repeated until I can remember the character’s first name), whose social climbing is a major plot mover, a son, and a daughter (played by Taissa Farmiga of American Horror Story fame). This daughter’s entrance into high society is the key through which her mother seeks to ascend to higher social status. There are other characters, but each fit into the verticals I’ve detailed above. Given such an array of characters with interlocking roles, the show seemed like it would follow in Downton Abbey’s footsteps and serve as imminently watchable content.
When the show was first announced, there was a lull between Downton’s original release and it’s first film iteration (a cloying, slightly unworthy follow-up to a series I felt had raised me), and I was extremely excited by the prospect of Fellowes focusing on an era which I had only been exposed to through one piece of media: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Now, credit where credit is due; the book was first introduced to me by Gossip Girl’s second season episode in which the main characters performed the story for their senior year theatre production. This episode, and my subsequent reading of this novel almost a decade later, provided me the background needed to tackle Fellowes’ new work. If you haven’t read this novel, you should. It provides quite the contrast to the subject of this review.
Marian (played by Louisa Jacobson) surrounded by Russells (played by Harry Richardson and Taissa Farmiga);
Courtesy of TVLine.com
Plot aside, The Age of Innocence’s emphasis on world-building was essential in informing me about The Gilded Age’s focus prior to the show’s release. In the novel, set in 1880’s New York, families associated with Old New York socialized endlessly while largely, firmly ignoring any potential new entrants into their preciously guarded milieu. Any cavorting with “the new people,” as they are referred to on the show, was forbidden. Such strictures frame every interaction in the novel, and I thought the show would be no different. After all, the Downton Abbey of Fellowes’s imaginings borrows so heavily from history so as to make it believable, aside from its more melodramatic plotlines and much of the later seasons’ unlikely happy endings. After watching The Gilded Age’s first season, it seemed that Fellowes had indeed borrowed from history. Not only did he borrow from source material like The Age of Innocence; he also borrowed aggressively from his own history. Below, I’ve collated a list of the immense number of parallels between Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age. In most cases, Downton did it better (perhaps because it simply did whatever it is a decade earlier).
- A young, feisty, poor relation of decent birth comes to live with her more conservative relatives. (Meryl Streep’s daughter’s character; Lily James’s Lady Rose McClare)
- A young woman from a disenfranchised background seeks to better herself by gaining employment outside the confines of service (Peggy Scott; Gwen and Mr. Molesley (not a woman, I’m aware, but the principle applies)
- A lady’s maid connives against her mistress, with intentions of a leading a life beyond that which she currently leads (Carrie Coon’s character’s lady’s maid; Ms. O’Brien and Edna Braithwaite)
- An elderly widow of noble stature seeks to protect the social mores which she believes are what define polite, upstanding society, and therefore set an example for other, lower, impolite societies (Aunt Agnes; the Dowager Countess)
- Another widow chafes against the elder with her more liberal views but a smaller amount of tangible influence over their shared environs (Aunt Ada; Isobel Crawley)
- A young servant boy craves the affections of another servant in the house, who expresses subtle interest but for whatever reason is unable to commit to him (servant resembling Timothee Chalamet and that Irish maid; William and Daisy)
- A girl of noble birth befriends one of a lower class, with the somewhat patronizing goal of ensuring that her poor counterpart becomes gainfully employed (Meryl Streep’s daughter and Peggy Scott; Lady Sybil and Gwen, along with Lady Rose and Mrs. Bunting)
- A young girl resents her lack of autonomy and the degree of influence others, specifically her parents, have in the trajectory of her life (Taissa Farmiga’s character; Lady Sybil)
- A butler seeks to maintain some version of decorum in the downstairs kingdom over which he reigns, which he finds difficult owing primarily to snippy lady’s maids and youthful staff (Bannister and Carrie Coon’s character’s butler; Mr. Carson)
- More progressive members of the upper class clash with more conservative ones over their willingness to socialize outside the borders established by precedent (Mrs. Fane and Mrs. Morris/Aunt Agnes; Mrs. Isobel Crawley and the Dowager Countess)
Who’s tired from reading that long list of overlaps between The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey? I know I am and certainly was as I watched week after week of The Gilded Age’s first season. The sheer volume of similarities reminds me of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which borrowed so liberally from A New Hope that I left the theater in 2015 feeling irate, despondent, and nauseous in equal measure. At the time, I read a surprisingly small amount of literature regarding this over-borrowing, though I’ve read proportionally more regarding overlaps between Fellowes’ two high-budget period dramas. I will admit my suspicion that the number of Downton fans who actually care about these overlaps when watching The Gilded Age is probably insubstantial. Perhaps I’m an exception as a fan who does care, but I’ll openly acknowledge that we are here to watch Fellowes build his world and to play in it, even if it means engaging in this near-constant retreading. Still, it is amusing that characterization and character arcs follow such familiar paths from that which we all trod before thanks to Fellowes’ opus. But watching Fellowes’s work did not, until the airing of this show (unless you count Fellowes’ Doctor Thorne, Available on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S. and a show that I cannot claim to have cared to finish), simply entail being satisfied with watching prettily costumed pretty people go from room to room with minimal characterization, shoddy motivations, and a sometimes-silly plot. Yes, Downton had its fair share of idiocy and storybook endings that seemed completely divorced from what reality could have been at the time, but it buttressed these tendencies with a commitment to well-drawn characterization that’s hard to find in The Gilded Age. Is it necessary or productive to compare these two shows? Absolutely! I, after all, thought that Fellowes intended to make a similar set of points with this show that he did with its long-running predecessor. I seemed to have been somewhat mistaken.
Now, the essential question, and one that tends to not need to be asked of a quality show, is simple: what is the point? With Downton, Fellowes makes a set of points, chief among which is to foster empathy. Empathy for whom? Fellowes asks his audience to feel for a class of people who had everything thanks to the labor of those that had nothing and who used these resources to maintain a stranglehold on key arenas of British (and even global) life well into the 20th century. We should feel bad, Fellowes suggest, because history teaches us that the decline of the aristocracy is coming swiftly even as we enjoy the two decades that Downton provides a glimpse of. “Tom Bellasis has been killed,” says Lady Sybil during the show’s second season, before stating bleakly that “all the men [she’d] ever danced with are dead”. The death of Tom Bellasis, whoever he is, represents the coming twilight of the British aristocracy’s hold on socioeconomic and political power. The sons of lords and ladies fell swiftly to German bullets, and the Second World War put a final nail in many of these families’ coffins. Many survive in one form or another (with great wealth, I’m sure), but all that de jure privilege and influence have eroded significantly; all that remains is the de facto, which I’m sure is substantial indeed.
The Crown, a non-Fellowes show focused on the British royal family airing on Netflix to significant acclaim, challenges viewers to sympathize with even more high-and-mighty main characters. The key distinction between this approach and Downton’s lies in the verb I use: to challenge. The Crown injects ambivalence into every scene in which the impetuous Princess Margaret, the belligerent Prince Phillip, the self-important Prince Charles, and other members of the Royal Family occupy. The viewer feels not just sympathy for individuals locked into a lifestyle like theirs (and like Lady Mary’s, or like Taissa Farmiga’s character’s, but also a degree of distaste for these sniveling creatures. Tonally, and from a dialogue perspective, the viewer can’t be sure whom to root for. Downton softens this ambivalence, less in its riveting initial three seasons but especially in later seasons when unsympathetic characters like Lady Mary and Thomas Barrow soften up, and The Gilded Age does away with this altogether. The Gilded Age’s characters, though vaguely based in reality, simply don’t seem real and therefore worthy of our sympathy. Even though we know what lies in wait for the old money families, i.e., a similar if less dramatic fate as the British aristocracy’s that I describe above and even the royal family’s, which has managed to cling to importance thanks in part to tabloid fixation, the fact that there lacks a proportionate amount of exploration of character mindsets and rationales as exists in other series leaves us wanting more from The Gilded Age’s most interesting characters.
Take, for example, the first season’s purported villain: the fictionalized version of the real-life Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, played by Tony Award-winner Donna Murphy (whose voice viewers my age might recognize from Tangled, a lovely movie in which she plays the main villain, Mother Gothel). Set up as the main points of contention for Carrie Coon’s character, this matron’s objections to the entry into polite society of “the new people” seem to be founded on nothing more than the basest snobbery. She worries that traditions will be cast aside, despite the simple logic that a wealthy new money elite seeking to enter into a long-standing social structure would likely seek to assimilate rather than rock the boat. The Gilded Age is set at a time when the influence of these ancient families of mostly Dutch origin like Mrs. Astors’ own family and that which she married into was shared with families more recent but still old families which all seem to come straight from the pages of a Wharton novel. These families would, in turn, be eclipsed by the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and other new-money families whose wealth yielded from railroads and other industrially sourced occupations. But in-universe, this new money has only just begun to rear its head and Mrs. Astor retains mighty sway over all New York. For all this power attributed to her, Fellowes never allows Mrs. Astor to make clear for the audience why she so easily bends to the will of Carrie Coon’s character by the end of the first season after offering consistently staunch resistance prior to the season finale. While she isn’t one of our main characters, a fleshed-out villain tends to provide more satisfying depth than the wide focus on a large volume of characters does. The adage quality over quantity has never been truer.
Fellowes refuses to entangle Mrs. Astor in any kind of real introspection, and she never admits anything other than that new money equates to an erosion of the standards she has taken upon herself to uphold. A little self-knowledge would likely go a long way in making her intransigence seem warranted and would help better establish one of the key conflicts the show is predicated on, in addition to better establishing why we should empathize with reactionaries. Maybe a little backstory, perhaps, as to how Mrs. Astor came from one of New York’s founding families and had to fight for her place within the Astor family for the reins of the city’s social machine and/or for the privilege of being referred to as the Mrs. Astor (at the expense of other potential candidates within the family). Even if artistic license was required to provide this context, conjuring something with his not insignificant storytelling powers would have gotten Fellowes a few more points in my book. For the creator, however, it is this newfound commitment to insubstantive spectacle which ensures that The Gilded Age falters in ways Downton and other period pieces with similar budgets hardly do.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013);
Courtesy of HollywoodReporter.com
A film I cherish perfectly anticipates a potential rationale for Mrs. Astor’s desire to keep the new people out: The Great Gatsby (2013; I have yet to watch the more ancient one). Set after the U.S’s Progressive Age came to a sad end, the postwar Roaring 20’s-focused novel is, for some reason, a staple of the high school classroom. And yes, for those curious, I never read that tiresome book. I have little use for a novel which focuses on an unrelenting, voyeuristic sycophant, a flighty, almost entirely unmoored egomaniac, and a mostly meek trophy wife whose ambivalence is tiresome at best and infuriating at worst. Wait. Perhaps I’m talking about The Age of Innocence. Anyway… In Gatsby, old money blue bloods like the Buchanans begrudgingly mingle with and tacitly pay homage to individuals like the titular character who have made their money off of such distasteful activities as industry and railways. Oh, and bootlegging. In the new New York 40 years removed from The Gilded Age, any notions of distinction between class and money exist only in the minds of those like Tom Buchanan, who is completely powerless to stem the tide of intermingling between groups. In fact, plenty of reputable people ostensibly belonging to the Mrs. Astor’s class are seen enjoying Gatsby’s parties throughout the film (and I’m sure they do in the book as well). Sure, I doubt someone like Tom Buchanan would consent to his daughter’s marriage to the son of a bootlegger, but the fact that such socializing takes place means that the opportunity for liaisons to form between old money and new are more possible than ever before. By allowing this intermingling, vulgarity will abound and structures will fall away.
Oh Mr. Fellowes! I present to you a better argument than any proffered by Mrs. Astor, other society matrons like the unfortunate Mrs. Morris, and Christine Baranski’s character, Aunt Agnes. While I concede that they nor anyone else could have predicted the First World War or the ensuing chaos that was the Roaring Twenties (not to mention its abrupt end and dramatic aftermath), but would a little imagination have gone amiss here? I don’t think so.
Frustration with Mrs. Astor aside, The Gilded Age is by no means a failure, despite the weakness of this key conceit and its purported champion’s characterization. The show is at its strongest when it leans into what seems to be the defining trait for a well-watched period drama. This defining trait is the show’s depiction of a simpler world. The average viewer hankers for this simpler world, (something which I recall Downton’s Dowager Countess also voices enthusiasm for when accused of hankering for the days of serfdom by Isobel Crawley in season two episode seven). We want Peggy Scott to gain renown for her labors, despite the racial and gender barriers which stand in her way; her finding love is an added bonus. We want Meryl Streep‘s daughter to find a suitable match, despite her modest wealth and recent entry into New York high society; finding a charitable cause she connects with and contributes to is an added bonus. On one level, the audience’s present-day yearning for this simplicity is borne of the complexity of our current predicament.
Many viewers’ lives are, at present, difficult and complicated; period TV provides a degree of immersive escapism that shows set in our current times or in alternative universes do not provide to some. This simplicity is, of course, borne of rigid, unegalatarian systems which individuals like Peggy and Marian (I’ve finally remembered the name of the character played by Meryl Streep’s daughter!) chafe against and seek to undermine, but we’ll return to this a little later. Audience members enjoy the simplicity of watching Peggy publish her articles (very satisfying) or Marian court a handsome social inferior (not as satisfying). It becomes easy to relish these struggles because they resemble those that an audience can relate to without these conditions really seeming real. Set in our present day or even in a slightly more realistic Gilded-Age era setting (i.e., more depictions of misery, poverty, and inequality?), it would probably be disheartening to see someone like Peggy fight against racial and gender discrimination in the world of news media (or in general). But place her on immaculately, unimaginably clean 5th Avenue with beautiful dresses, perfect makeup, no sweat stains, and a consistently, illogically calm demeanor and creators like Fellowes will have viewers lining up for further seasons starring such a character. The fact that many of the same issues characters like Peggy and Marian face exist today is extremely disheartening, but all such real world tensions melt away in the face of Fellowes’ world building and dialogue. Luckily for him, as well as the show’s cast and crew, the decline in quality of his work since Downton Abbey’s original TV run is hardly noticeable when simple pleasures abound.
Other such pleasures include the consistent commentary of Aunt Agnes, the stand-in for Maggie Smith’s inimitable Lady Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in the world of Downton Abbey. Played nearly perfectly by Christine Baranski, the character’s key (and almost only) personal characteristic is her devotion to social stratification. The fact that she is old and the city is hurriedly moving on signals the end of a simpler time when money and status were not equivalent. Status, in Aunt Agnes’s mind, equates to status; money simply allows one to construct or buy gaudier houses (as Carrie Coon’s character has done before the show begins). The Dutch progenitors of New York were, of course, mercantile elites themselves who held onto social capital even as other forms of capital were wrested from them first by the British and then by their American successors. This cognitive dissonance aside, we are exposed to few other members of the original Dutch or even colonial families that Aunt Agnes seems so bent on defending. Those members of the “old” families to whom Fellowes does expose us to don’t seem to play by Aunt Agnes‘s rules, with the exception of the unfortunate Mrs. Morris. Another old money socialite, Mrs. Fish, or the opportunistic Mrs. Fane, for example, consort with the new people with initial hesitation but ultimately little reservation. Perhaps we will meet more characters with similar ideals to those of Aunt Agnes and Mrs. Morris, but this conspicuous lack of individuals lamenting the end of this system makes their stubbornness seem more hollow than it should be and their fight less winnable. If this is going to be her key characteristic, it makes little sense to me why there is such little backbone provided to her arguments by other members of the cast.
But wait. What about Mrs. Astor, the only other character who actually fights for the beliefs that Aunt Agnes constantly espouses? These women and their characterization provide another example of Fellowes’ failings in providing adequate motivations for central characters and in providing a counterweight to the forces of change which Carrie Coon’s character (and to a much lesser, almost insignificant extent, Marian) exemplifies. Maybe this is all on purpose. Maybe in failing to provide better justifications for Mrs. Astor and Aunt Agnes to keep the new people out, Fellowes is actually betraying some of his own egalitarianism (though I’m not sure how much Julian Fellowes, English peer and conservative MP, actually has). The weakness of their arguments, contrasted with the strength of the opposition’s, might signal that Fellowes believes strongly in the new people’s worth and deserving of equal social standing with the old families. Simply repeating that individuals like Mr. Russell are not gentleman, as Mrs. Morris does, does not detract from the fact that the old and new people alike participate in the same economic and social arenas while utilizing the same tactics to achieve whatever ends they seek. Clear evidence of that comes when the New York City alderman, led by the ill-fated Mr. Morris, double cross Mr. Russell, employing tactics which Mrs. Morris would hardly say were gentlemanly. Or maybe Fellowes draws on history and does not waste time inventing reactionary arguments when he knows that money wins in the end and families like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers ascended to the same rank as the Astors and other such clans, before gradually replacing them.
The showdown between Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Russell (Carrie Coon’s character’s first name still hasn’t come back to me) in the season’s final few episodes is predicated on an actual situation which the real Mrs. Astor found herself in when Alva Vanderbilt disinvited Caroline “Carrie” Astor (the daughter, played in the show by Amy Forsyth) because her mother had refused to formally call on the Vanderbilts. To soothe tensions, Mrs. Astor reneged on her previous embargo and called on Alva Vanderbilt, just like her fictional counterpart does with Mrs. Russell. What tension was derived from the rivalry between old money and new dissipates almost completely after this détente is reached, though I’m sure Mrs. Astor has a few other tricks up her sleeve to isolate the new people which Fellowes will play next season. Speaking of next season, matters of inspiration will be somewhat complicated by the fact that the Vanderbilts exist in this universe. In the third episode, Mrs. Morris mentions this family alongside the Rockefellers and JP Morgan as consisting of the new people’s vanguard, intent on establishing themselves in New York. I’m curious to see if and how Fellowes intends to include these real-life figures, as he’s done with the Astors.
History tells us that Mrs. Astor facilitated the arrival of Alva Vanderbilt and her family to the New York social scene, and hopefully Fellowes will remain faithful to the colorful life Mrs. Vanderbilt lived as he continues to build out Mrs. Russell’s character (her first name, by the way, has come to me: it’s Bertha!). Alva Vanderbilt was, according to ever-trusty Wikipedia, wealthy in her own right on account of her family’s income. She married William Vanderbilt, built his house, had his children, and later divorced him on account of his consistent, unfailing adultery. She, like Mrs. Russell’s dynamic with her on-screen daughter played by Taissa Farmiga, exercised full control over her children and sought the most advantageous marriage possible for her daughter. Farmiga’s character’s real-life counterpart, Consuelo Vanderbilt, went on to marry the Duke of Marlborough, a relative of Winston Churchill, thereby cementing the family’s status amongst New York’s elite. The intermarriage between wealthy Americans and titled, penniless English nobles is a theme well-known to Fellowes; viewers of Downton will remember that Robert married Cora primarily to shore up his failing estate, the show’s namesake. Given all this history, I find myself more excited for what Fellowes hasn’t shown us and what’s hopefully yet to come than I was by what he did with this season. It seems like the show’s soon-to-be focus will be on the Russell daughter’s marriage. Given the low-stakes nature of this season, that sounds like a much more invigorating prospect.
Carrie Coon’s Bertha Russell and Donna Murphy’s Mrs. Astor:
Two titans in tiaras;
Courtesy of Variety.com
In my review, I’ll admit to having omitted a great deal of characters and plot lines which I do not believe heightened the show’s stakes or served any discernible purpose other than to distract from the Mrs. Astor-Mrs. Russell storyline and fill each Gilded Age’s episodes’ considerable runtime. Mr. Russell, a business tycoon a la William Vanderbilt (who here thinks of Nate Archibald’s grandfather from Gossip Girl when they read this name?), struggles with litigation and business dealings throughout the show from which he ultimately emerges triumphant. Boring. I knew he would. It was never an option that he wouldn’t emerge victorious, simply because the show would be unable to coherently function. Our resident robber baron flirts with ruin, yes, but Mrs. Russell’s plotlines would all completely evaporate if her husband lost the family’s money. I also ignore the Mr. Raikes-Marian plotline. After all, it becomes clear as we endure the he loves me, he loves me not agony borne of Marian’s indecision that the show cannot allow her to marry Mr. Raikes. A marriage to this social climber would crush any ability Marian had to interact with her Aunt Agnes, who wholly disapproves of this liaison, and would likely keep her out of New York society despite Mr. Raikes’ unlikely ability to participate in that society. The show needs her to stay, which means he must go.
Also ignored are Cynthia Nixon’s character, Aunt Ada, who exists solely for the purpose of using pathos to soften the harsh rationalism of Baranski’s Aunt Agnes, and the servants, who fail to make the audience care about their internal desires and motivations in any real way. Peggy Scott’s family dynamic is more interesting than these plot lines, but her storyline exists in such a vacuum compared to the rest of the show’s arcs that it almost seems like it should be the focus of a standalone series. In Downton’s fourth season, Lily James’s Lady Rose gets involved with Jack Ross, a black American band singer who ultimately realizes the impossibility of ever ending up happy with the daughter of a Scottish marquess. Fellowes now poses the question of what a show would be like if we upgraded the token character of color to series regular, but only goes so far as to involve her with Aunt Agnes’s household. I don’t know if Fellowes will find ways for Ms. Scott to participate more actively in the society Marian has just entered beyond acting as her wingwoman for clandestine encounters, but I really hope Fellowes does more with her character. The show actively explores Ms. Scott’s backstory, which is welcome, but the disconnect between her personal struggles and the wider world with which she barely interacts is palpable whenever she’s off screen. If she didn’t exist on the show, we would hardly notice her absence, which represents quite the injustice for so interesting a character. All this being said, Ms. Scott is easily more interesting than milquetoast Marian, who I admit is well acted by (runs to Google to find her name) Louisa Jacobson, Meryl Streep’s daughter. Her earnestness and commitment to the character is nice to watch, even if most of her plotlines are hardly very intriguing or substantial.
The Gilded Age is, of course, not without its charms. How could it not be? The production value is stellar, as expected. While the outdoor sets look like they’ve been constructed specifically to create a two-block radius that reminds me of an upgraded frontier town in a Western period drama, the indoor settings look historically faithful and well curated. The dialogue vacillates between overly ornate and unnatural (the accents??) to playful and delightful. The repartee, particularly between Oscar van Rhijn and his mother is a nice callback to wittier times (during Downton’s run). The same cannot be said for the dialogue between the multitudinous servants whose names escape me other than the butler, Bannister. Attention to detail is hardly lacking here with costuming and other nuggets of history. The as-of-then incomplete Statue of Liberty’s hand, for example, was a cute detail, yes, but Fellowes perhaps overshoots in his quest for packing the show with historical context. Sure, the city’s elites would likely have taken part in supporting Clara Barton’s Red Cross initiative and Thomas Edison’s electrical endeavors, but did our characters really have to take such active part in these experiences too? We’re back to one of The Gilded Age’s central themes: spectacle over depth and quantity over quality.
Detractors from my long-winded criticisms of the lack of relationship between actual history beneath surface level and insubstantial leanings on that history for the sake of spectacle will assert that the job of shows like The Gilded Age is not to educate viewers on 19th century American history. These detractors might argue that the point of such a show is to simply entertain and provide light entertainment using history as a mirroring framework or playground. My argument seeks not to directly rebut the notion that this show is one that should primarily entertain. After all, if it wasn’t entertaining, I wouldn’t watch. The point I seek to make is that for period pieces specifically but for all TV more generally, there is a higher guarantee of entertainment value if characters, rationales and other plot points are justifiable, well-connected, and rely not just on history or external context for the sake of spectacle but also for the sake of substance. Villains are often easy to love, and it becomes even easier if we know why they’re engaged in villainy. Because Fellowes refuses to provide more dimension to Mrs. Astor, we lose out on the enjoyment of connecting to our purported villain. Our protagonists, namely Marian and Peggy Scott, also falter in their ability to conjure a connection.
That which I said of Mrs. Astor can be said, to a lesser extent, of Aunt Agnes, a reactionary in the face of the new people’s emergence. She received some healthy characterization when we learn that she struggled in the face of her late husband‘s tyranny, but no connection is made between this and her vehement opposition to the forces which Mrs. Russell represents. Does Aunt Agnes strongly advise against Marian’s involvement with someone of low birth like Mr. Raikes because she believes that if a woman is doomed to spend her life with a man she should at least spend it with one of means? Probably, but we never hear her say this. It occurs to me that maybe you think I wish to be spoonfed the critical thinking behind each character’s motivations. That would be nice, but not what I ask for here. All I ask of Mr. Fellowes and other creators is that they spend less time thinking about how to inject convenient, artificial spectacle for shock and awe or humorous dialogue between irrelevant characters and more time illustrating how and why characters think and do the things they think and do. The stakes will automatically be higher when we know what an individual has to lose, and we can only know this based on their perception of what they have to lose. Mrs. Astor and Aunt Agnes probably tremble at the notion of Jay Gatsby, but to anyone who’s seen season one of The Gilded Age, it seems like all that these characters care about is their need to socialize with people whom they’re familiar with owing to generations of proximity. If that really were the premise of this show’s central conflict, the whole thing would seem silly indeed. And maybe that’s okay… for other people. Regardless, I will be watching The Gilded Age’s second season, and I’ll enjoy it too, just as I did the first. I look forward to giggling, beaming, and gnashing my teeth in equal measure.
