With its Broadway royalty on full display, I can’t help but be seduced by the lavish nonsense of The Gilded Age, now in its second season
“Mrs Russell is exactly where she should be”
Much as I try to sidestep Julian Fellowes’ oeuvre where possible these days, the sheer star quality of The Gilded Age is nigh on impossible to resist, particularly for theatre nerds. Christine Baranski! Donna Murphy! Audra McDonald! Michael Cerveris! Kelli O’Hara! Nathan Lane! Laura Benanti! And so much more besides, it’s a Broadway-heavy company to be sure and they totally sell the fripperies and frivolities of New York City high society in the 1880s.
The lauded first season set the scene for the essential battle between new money and old money, with the nouveau riche Russell family setting the cat among the pigeons with their arrival on the Upper East Side, particularly with neighbours the van Rhijn-Brook family and doyenne of the social scene Mrs Astor. Alongside were familiarly ham-fisted attempts at looking at homosexuality and racial dynamics of the time, plus the lives of the below-stairs people too.
Series 2 is no less formulaic, with several tired plot devices being recycled by Fellowes. Oh no, bankruptcy! But for half an episode. Unexpected happy marriage! Doomed after a couple of episodes. The plight of the African-American upper class is more sensitively explored though, with striking contrast provided during a visit to Alabama. And whilst the season-long narrative of the rival opera houses does get an unreasonable amount of airtime, it folds together into a nifty climax.
Crucial to the show’s success is Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector as Bertha and George Russell, the deeply smitten new money couple taking the city by storm, whether manipulating union bosses seeking fair pay or socialites sleeping with their sons, they’re a force of nature to behold and no more so than when experiencing turbulence in their personal lives with the arrival of a figure from their past. Bertha’s obsession with Ben Lamb’s Duke of Buckingham is also lots of fun.
Across the street is the deliciously good Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon as the van Rhijn-Brook sisters Agnes and Ada, who are slightly less well served by the writing, subject as they are to some of the above-mentioned recycling. That said, the upshot of all the dramatics is an interesting shift in power dynamic between the pair which could be fertile ground for the next series. And heaven knows I’ll be watching once again.
