The Gilded Age Sends Downton Abbey To the Past and Across the Pond

Save for a 2019 revival movie (and its upcoming sequel later this year), the absence of Julian Fellowes’ aristocratic costume drama “Downton Abbey” has left an ornately-manicured hole in the pop culture atmosphere. Yes, we’ve filled it with “Bridgerton” and “The Great,” but those shows play giddily with anachronisms of race and language and lust. Fellowes doesn’t need all that postmodern frippery; his interest is squarely in where the old meets the new, where traditions clash with modernity, and how technology and social advancements shrink the worlds of those for whom life as it was served them quite nicely. This time, with “The Gilded Age,” he abandons jolly old England for the American frontier, and the results are as dazzling as they are dangerously familiar.

The Gilded Age itself, of course, refers to the boom years of the late 19th-century when the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of American wealth. This was when the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and the J.P. Morgans of the world came to prominence, railroad men and robber barons taking advantage of cheap labor and mechanization to build fortunes to rival the bluebloods whose own wealth stretched back centuries. Now, the nouveau riche had the literal and social capital to enter the upper crust, and the old-money aristocrats bristled at the idea of their lessers standing on their level. 

That’s the dynamic at the heart of Fellowes’ newest series, which ports all the lush period costuming and sizzling class tensions across the Atlantic with nary a feather ruffled. We’re no longer staring at one isolated manor in a field, but two houses facing each other on a bustling New York roadway in 1882. One belongs to the van Rhijns, a family of generational wealth led by the widowed and wizened Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski, who hurls an acidic bon mot as swiftly as Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess) who lives there with her kinder, but less fortunate sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon). 

The other? A newly-constructed mansion with high ceilings and even higher aspirations, the product of railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his social-climber wife Bertha (Carrie Coon). While George is busy building his empire (and bribing aldermen and undercutting competitors to do it), Bertha doggedly pursues the social acceptance of her new peers. “I don’t want my old friends,” she tells Morgan. “I want new ones.” But making those friends, especially in a stubborn matriarch like Agnes, will prove to be trouble.

Further complicating this dynamic is the arrival of Agnes and Ada’s niece Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson, daughter of Meryl Streep), who comes from rural Pennsylvania to live with them after her father dies, leaving her penniless. On the train, circumstance bonds her to a young Black woman named Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), an aspiring writer coming to live with family in Brooklyn to make her start. Soon, Marian is torn between several different worlds—old and new money, white and Black, male and female—as the social war for America’s new class dynamics rages on.

In all the right ways, “The Gilded Age” feels like “Downton Abbey,” from its well-manicured production design to its stunning costumes, to the far-reaching cast of characters. It’s got an American sensibility, to be sure; after all, most of the cast is drawn from New York’s mantle-deep pool of theater actors. (It even makes room for Nathan Lane as famous New York socialite Ward McAllister, whose Savannah drawl has big Caleb Crawdad energy.) But it’s still a tale of feuding elites, intricately-organized salons, and the wide rifts between upstairs and downstairs at its core. Take a drink every time someone says “luncheon”: four episodes in, the only thing gilded will be your liver.

“Downton Abbey” veteran Michael Engler, along with Salli Richardson-Whitfield, direct with an eye for elevating these characters’ squabbles to the level of high drama, with ornately-staged, long shots floating through the Russell’s new home like it’s the Copacabana. So much the better, too, to capture all the glistening chandeliers and foot-tall fascinators these people use as signifiers of wealth. While the servants don’t get as much real estate as they did in “Downton Abbey,” the Russells’ phalanx of help—from a pompous French chef (Douglas Sills) to a ambitious maid (Kelley Curran) who spends every scene enigmatically plotting her escape from servitude—offer the occasional contrast between the classes.