The Gilded Age: I Love This Show. I Just Wish It Were Better.
Beautiful costumes, extraordinary actors, fascinating characters — and a script that too often leaves their potential unexplored.
By The Episode Edit ·
This review discusses major developments in Seasons 1–3 of The Gilded Age and the opening episode of Downton Abbey.
I look forward to new episodes of The Gilded Age with an enthusiasm that my opinion of the writing can scarcely account for. I want to know what Bertha Russell will do next. I want to hear Christine Baranski object to whatever has just been proposed. I want to see what everyone is wearing when she does. Three seasons in, I care about these people, and I still find it astonishing how often the show gives them something momentous to do without giving them anything particularly interesting to say about it.
There’s a difference between enjoying a series and thinking it’s excellent. The Gilded Age makes that difference unusually easy to live with. It’s funny, handsome, and remarkably good company. It’s also a frustratingly uneven drama that mistakes a large cast for an ensemble, a reversal for a revelation, and, on its less inspired evenings, the announcement of a feeling for the feeling itself.
A city worth dressing up for
In the first-season finale, Bertha uses her daughter’s debutante ball to get Mrs. Astor to acknowledge her. Carrie Astor wants to attend. Bertha can make that happen, provided Carrie’s mother finally pays her a visit. It’s a deliciously petty use of an extravagant occasion, and it tells you something about this New York. Mrs. Astor’s power depends on other women agreeing that her invitations matter. Bertha has worked out what happens when one of them issues an invitation that matters more.
The production gives that fight a physical shape. Bob Shaw’s sets make the Russells’ new mansion feel like a public statement that people happen to live inside. Kasia Walicka Maimone’s costumes give the women another way to announce themselves before they speak. By the time Season 2 turns rival opera houses into competing social camps, the show has taught us how to read the spectacle. Where everyone sits is half the fun.
Carrie Coon is particularly good at conveying how much work goes into making an outcome look inevitable. Bertha can be enjoying a triumph and still seem alert to the person who might spoil it. Morgan Spector gives George a confidence that makes sense beside her. You can see why they would enjoy being married to each other. That pleasure matters when the third season asks what happens if one of them starts to regard the other’s talent for getting things done as a liability.
What Baranski and Nixon are doing with the material
Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon are the actors I most want to see the series challenge. Baranski gives Agnes van Rhijn an ear for the precise degree of insult a situation will bear. Nixon’s Ada can defer so graciously that you almost miss how carefully she has registered the offense. There’s a whole history of living together in the difference between how these women speak and what each expects the other to understand.
The Season 2 finale briefly gives that history something to do. Oscar has lost the family fortune. Ada discovers that her late husband, Luke Forte, left her enough money to keep the household going. When Bannister looks to Ada for authority, the household’s new arrangement becomes plain in the time it takes a butler to decide whom to address. It’s better writing than a speech about the sisters’ changing relationship would have been. The exchange is funny because the slight is impeccably polite and everyone knows exactly what it means.
The plotting that gets them there is far less deft. A husband dies, a fortune disappears, and a previously unknown inheritance arrives just in time. In the Season 3 finale, Agnes is offered the vice presidency of the New York Heritage Society and cedes her place at the head of the table to Ada. It’s a neat visual bookend. It’s also a remarkably tidy settlement for two people whose affection is tangled up with decades of deference. Agnes acquires a dignified position elsewhere just as she is ready to yield the one at home. I’d have found the concession more revealing if she’d had to make it without a fresh supply of dignity.
That’s where the series underuses Baranski and Nixon. Both can play affection and resentment within the same courtesy. The scripts keep giving them material in which those feelings take turns. A good line gets Agnes a laugh. A kind gesture reassures us about Ada. The sharper scene would make each woman wonder whether the other’s kindness had just cost her something.
A big cast, a crowded story
Denée Benton’s Peggy Scott is one of the strongest reasons for the show to range beyond the households on 61st Street. Her journalism takes her to Tuskegee in Season 2, while her family story forces her to contend with the harm done by a father who believed he was protecting her. She has work she wants to do, people she loves, and reasons to distrust the judgment of people who love her. Benton makes those different sides of Peggy feel like parts of one life.
The structure can make that life feel oddly compartmentalized. Season 1 ends with Peggy learning that the son she believed had died at birth had survived. At the start of Season 2 she learns that he has since died and visits his grave. The sequence is painful, but the construction uses two enormous revelations to raise and then foreclose the prospect of a reunion. By Season 3, when Peggy tells William Kirkland about her past, there’s a compelling question about what it costs her to trust someone with that knowledge. I wanted the intervening story to make that cost more legible in her choices. The biggest facts of Peggy’s life shouldn’t do most of their dramatic work when they’re being disclosed.
The third-season finale shows how much business a single episode is asked to clear. Peggy and William get engaged, Marian and Larry reconcile, Oscar proposes a marriage of mutual convenience to Enid, and the Russells’ marriage is in trouble. Each development could alter how we understand the people involved. With so many arriving in succession, too many register chiefly as news. An ensemble can be as large as this one and still feel coherent if the stories change the meaning of one another. A succession of updates, however welcome, leaves me keeping track when I’d rather be getting involved.
The difference between an event and a consequence
Gladys Russell’s wedding has genuine dramatic force. Taissa Farmiga gives us a bride who goes through with the ceremony in tears. George has opposed the match, but by the wedding day he accepts that calling it off would damage his daughter’s reputation. His decision exposes the limits of his protectiveness. It also makes the later rupture with Bertha more interesting. He can be furious at what she did and still have to reckon with the fact that he helped it happen.
The writing gets easier on Bertha once Gladys needs her help at Sidmouth. Bertha recognizes that Lady Sarah runs the household and helps her daughter assert herself. It makes sense that Gladys would need precisely the skills she has spent so long being subjected to. The weakness is in how readily the plot lets useful advice stand in for a reckoning between them. One good exchange could have made Gladys’s gratitude uncomfortable for both women. As it stands, Bertha gets to demonstrate that she knows how to manage the situation, which was hardly in doubt. What I wanted to learn was whether she could hear her daughter describe the cost of being managed.
What Downton Abbey got right from the start
Downton Abbey had me emotionally invested almost immediately. Its first episode brings news of the Titanic, throws the inheritance into crisis, and introduces Bates as Lord Grantham’s new valet. The inheritance matters because Mary has lost a fiancé and faces a future shaped by decisions she cannot make for herself. Bates’s arrival matters because Robert’s loyalty to a man he knows from the war puts him at odds with a staff that has to do the work. A decision can be decent from one part of the house and deeply inconvenient from another.
That’s what makes the comparison with Fellowes’s other series so revealing. By the end of that opening episode, I understood enough about the people at Downton to feel the pressure of incompatible obligations. The period rules came to life through what people were prepared to do to one another, including when they believed they were doing the right thing. The Gilded Age has its own city, its own ambitions, and plenty of material for an equally immediate attachment. I keep thinking of the Downton premiere because Fellowes has already shown how quickly a social rule can become somebody’s personal problem.
I’ll still be watching
My verdict after three seasons is that The Gilded Age is wonderfully entertaining and considerably less accomplished as a drama than its cast, setting, and best scenes suggest. It has a sharp eye for the ways people advertise power and a less reliable instinct for what having power does to them. It can write a devastatingly polite exchange, then contrive a resolution that spares its characters from having a difficult conversation. I want a show this good at getting people into a room to be more curious about what they might do once they’re there.
Season 4 has begun, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes them. I’d happily accept another invitation from Bertha. I’d be even happier if, somewhere between the receiving line and dinner, somebody told her something she couldn’t turn to her advantage.
Related reading
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THE EPISODE EDIT / DISCUSSION
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Which storyline in The Gilded Age promised more than it delivered? What could one scene have revealed about the characters that the plot left unexplored?
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