The Gilded Age Season 3 premiered last Sunday and I could not be any happier. Everyone loves this dumb, low-stakes show because it’s perfect. It’s full of scandals like “what do servants do when they’re given contradictory orders” and “what kind of soup should be served at lunch” and “is that well-connected society woman going to murder her husband because he wants a divorce?” It’s like Downton Abbey, only American and someone weirder and crazier. Anyway, I wanted to discuss this bad review of The Gilded Age in the New Yorker, specifically this part:
But the creator of “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes—whose earlier period drama, “Downton Abbey,” drew criticisms as a rose-colored apologia for the British aristocracy—is single-minded in his focus on the loveliness of the veneer. It’s hard to think of another series currently on the air as lavish, or as vacuous. A businessman’s quip that banks are like women—they “panic at the unimportant and ignore the essentials”—is supposed to scan as boorish but inadvertently summarizes many of the show’s story lines. Plenty of series have managed to make frivolity feel meaningful, or at least fun. But so little actually happens, episode by episode, that “The Gilded Age” scarcely qualifies as a soap opera: by the time the Russell and Van Rhijn butlers begin passive-aggressively debating the placement of salad forks and coffee spoons, it’s clear we’re meant to feast on scraps.
Part of the problem is that there have been no real stakes to the proceedings. Other series about the ultra-wealthy, such as “Succession” and “The White Lotus,” illustrate how money cannot protect against emotional (or even physical) harm; if anything, the characters’ riches make them more vulnerable to it. “The Gilded Age” takes place during a time of extreme flux, and the variability of its characters’ fates is meant to be central to its premise.
This reminds me of something Emma Thompson said about Jane Austen’s books (and I’m paraphrasing) but it was basically like: people don’t take these stories seriously because they’re about women in drawing rooms and not men on a battlefield, but lives are being changed just as drastically in those drawing rooms. Just because The Gilded Age is a soap opera set in the 1880s doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have some substance and something to say. Season 3 is already getting into some good territory – a fictionalized take on Consuelo Vanderbilt, how divorces were conducted in this time period, the education of women, and the early days of the Prohibition and suffrage movements. And TGA tackles those subjects in a funny, light and enjoyable way!
Julian Fellowes also said that he had no idea if TGA will get a fourth or fifth season. I heard that HBO CEO Casey Bloys basically decided to give the show a third season as fan-service to the gay community, so I hope everyone is LOUD about the third season, because I want this to keep going!
Photos courtesy of The Gilded Age’s IG.
