Downton Abbey creator strikes gold with The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age ★★★★
Paramount+

If it had nothing else going for it, The Gilded Age would be a must-watch simply for Christine Baranski’s wonderfully sour one-liners.

As wealthy widow Agnes Van Rhijn, a member of the city’s ruling class, she is standing firm against the onslaught of new money with its attendant social aspirations in the New York of 1882.

The main players: (l-r) Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon), George Russell (Morgan Spector), Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), Peggy Scott (Denee Benton), Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski). Credit: HBO/NBC Universal

“I am struggling to hold back the tide of vulgarians that threatens to engulf us,” she tells her spinster sister, Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon), as she rails against the occupiers of the new mansion that has just sprung up on the other side of 61st Street. “I feel like King Canute.”

In reference to the fact that Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) and her ruthless railroad magnate husband George (Morgan Spector) – the occupiers of the grandiose mini-Versailles – have not yet debuted their daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), in society she quips: “Do people like that bring their daughters out? I thought they just sold them to the highest bidder.”

When Ada wonders if some chap might “take a shine” to their poor-but-delightful niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson, daughter of Meryl Streep), Agnes snipes: “I’d be grateful if you keep your circus-hall slang to yourself”.

And when Agnes’ rakish son Oscar (Blake Ritson) dares to contradict her, she snaps “I’m not concerned with facts, not if they interfere with my beliefs”.

But delicious as they are (I could watch Baranski on endless loop), there is much more to The Gilded Age than finely honed barbs.

This long-gestating series from Julian Fellowes bears more than a passing resemblance to his Downton Abbey (and began life as a prequel of sorts), though its marriage-drama plotline also recalls Jane Austen and its social dynamics echo those of Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray gets a shout-out). In its grander ambitions, though, it’s no less than a portrait of a pivotal moment in the history of laissez-faire capitalism, US-style.

The key word in all this is gilded: it suggests an age that is not actually golden, but merely lustrous on the surface. Though there’s plenty of opulence on display in the grand homes (many interior scenes were shot in the industrialists’ summer palaces of Newport, Rhode Island) and the acres of silk, Fellowes is more than passingly interested in the era’s seedier underside, too.

It’s there in the bigotry upstairs and down and the SoHo tenement houses of the truly poor. It’s in the racism that still rules post-emancipation, as experienced by Marian’s aspiring writer friend Peggy Scott (Denee Benton). It’s there in the small everyday stories of sexual abuse, chauvinism and closeted homosexuality that litter the 10 episodes.

But without question, the main focus is the battle between new money and old, epitomised by the Van Rhijn household on one side of the street staring down the Russells on the other.

“We only receive the old people in this house, not the new. Never the new,” Agnes instructs Marian soon after her arrival from Pennsylvania. “The old have been in charge since before the Revolution. They ruled, justly, until the new people invaded.”

The barbarians are at the gate, in other words, and it’s hard to know whether to be horrified or to cheer them on. But with Baranski providing the running commentary, it’s a battle to savour.

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