‘The Gilded Age’ Pilot Review
There has been a gaping hole in our hearts since the close of Downton Abbey. Thankfully the creator of Downton Abbey has now given us The Gilded Age on HBO, and HBO Max, and it delivers.
The Gilded Age was first announced nearly a full decade ago, and now the long wait feels justified. With a stellar cast, and a plotline in its pilot that has left us savoring for the crumbs of episode two, we wait on the edge of our seat for what happens next. We’re not going to lie if Julian Fellowes had decided to gift us the entire season in a sitting, we’d have cancelled our weekend to put this masterpiece into our eyeballs.
In mid-March of 2020 The Gilded Age was set to roll on primary filming just five days short of when all productions shut down because of this horrible and enduring pandemic. The show didn’t even have a chance to stretch its wings and after such a long pre-development phase showrunner Julian Fellowes thought the virus “might be the death knell” for the project. Thank GOD it wasn’t, because ladies and gentlemen this show is a gift.
The Gilded Age is a period drama focusing on the postbellum friction between the Upper East Side’s old-money establishment and one family of social climbers with newfound railroad wealth (as well as the staff that work for them).
Julian Fellowes initially wrote a pilot about the Vanderbilts — whose vast shipping and railroad fortune led to the creation of Vanderbilt University and the construction of opulent mansions like The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island — that was never made. That earlier script convinced Fellowes that writing about real historical figures restricted his ability to tell an engaging story. “My next idea to write a Gilded Age series that wasn’t a direct narration of the Vanderbilts,” rather one that was populated with fictional characters, with a few historical figures thrown in “was there almost immediately in my head,” he says.
Unlike Julian Fellowes previous works, The Gilded Age is more optimistic about wealth than Downton Abbey or Gosford Park because in transferring a comparably structured upstairs/downstairs story to America in the 1880s, it’s about a birth-of-empire. The prime players in the pilot set up the season as we see, a story that is centered on 61st Street and 5th Avenue of New York City (of course). On one side of the road, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), is mourning the death of her father, who left her penniless is left with no option but to move in with her aunts Agnes (Christine Baranski) and Ada (Cynthia Nixon). She arrives accompanied by new acquaintance Peggy (Denée Benton) who saves her after a robbery, Peggy is an aspiring writer who doesn’t want to move back to her parents’ upper-class Black enclave in Brooklyn. Meanwhile on the other side of the street, a garish new mansion has just been erected, with the new money Russells, railroad magnate George (Morgan Spector) and his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), along with sheltered daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) and recent Harvard grad son, Larry (Harry Richardson). The drama ensues as the younger generations ideals are not holding up to the strict beliefs of the older generations. Love, Betrayal, and Drama is afoot.
The Gilded Age premiered Jan. 24 on HBO.
