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When “The Gilded Age” premiered in 2022, the reception was warm enough. The HBO costume drama marked creator Julian Fellowes’ highly anticipated follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” bringing his eye for aristocratic quirks
across the Atlantic and delivering the requisite dose of upstairs-downstairs intrigue. But the low-stakes pleasures of selecting silverware and competing opera houses could be a double-edged sword. The series was always enjoyable, but it wasn’t must-see TV.
Then, as its third season rolled out last year, “The Gilded Age” experienced the kind of reversal that could be a storyline on the show, where fortunes are made and lost overnight as America invents itself on the fly.
First came the memes, dubbing a railroad tycoon “Train Daddy” and an enterprising inventor “Clock Twink.” (In another show of cultural soft power, the cast of “The Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip” threw a “The Gilded Age”-themed costume party in the most recent season finale.) Then the ratings, which confirmed the phenomenon wasn’t an online mirage: Every episode in the season’s second half set viewership records, culminating in a finale that earned 5 million viewers in three days — an 88% increase over the premiere. Finally, Season 3 received eight Emmy nominations, more than both its predecessors combined.
But nobody knows “The Gilded Age” has hit the big time better than the people who make it. “We turned some sort of corner,” says Fellowes. Morgan Spector, who plays robber baron George Russell (aka Train Daddy), agrees: “It felt like we broke containment.” And Denée Benton, whose budding writer Peggy Scott acts as an entry point into New York’s prosperous Black elite, still sounds astonished. “We were such a slow burn,” Benton says. “All of a sudden, our show was this pop culture hit!”
In a contracting entertainment landscape well past the apex of Peak TV, it’s rare for any show with production values as high as those of “The Gilded Age” — which films in New York City— to last through a third season in the first place.Even rarer is a series seizing on the opportunity to make a quantum leap several years into its run. But “The Gilded Age” returns for Season 4 on Nov. 1 a conquering hero — and a testament to what can happen when a story gets the time and space to come into its own.
“The Gilded Age” introduced itself as a tale of social disruption: When George and his equally ambitious wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), move into a Manhattan mansion in the early 1880s, their arrival is a seismic event that upends the city’s hidebound establishment. Season 4 builds on a strong foundation to escalate the action further. Its mix of escapist fantasy and emotional substance has never felt more dialed in, nor the political relevance of staggering income inequality and meddlesome tycoons more pronounced. A subplot about anti-monopoly legislation will play out in the shadow of HBO’s assimilation into the new Skydance Corp., the result of a merger that faced a challenge on antitrust grounds from multiple state attorneys general. The echo isn’t intentional, but not a coincidence either — it’s proof of how deeply “The Gilded Age” has tapped into the zeitgeist.
“The Gilded Age” is, in a sense, an overnight success many years in the making. It was first announced at NBC in 2018, though the news followed extended speculation that Fellowes’ next project would be a “Downton” prequel centering “dollar princesses” like the series’ matriarch Cora Crowley (Elizabeth McGovern) — the daughters of American new money who married cash-strapped European aristocrats in a neat exchange of riches for prestige. (“The Gilded Age” became a stand-alone story, but features a dollar princess of its own in George’s daughter, Gladys, played by Taissa Farmiga, who marries a duke and moves to England in Season 3.) The nascent series then moved to HBO along with executive Bob Greenblatt, whom Fellowes credits for getting the show through protracted development and on the air.
“He made all the difference, because he really held our hands and just kept charging, and you need someone like that on your side,” Fellowes says of Greenblatt, who left WarnerMedia in 2020. “Television is a jungle, and you need people to cut through it.”
For another machete wielder, Fellowes turned to executive producer Sonja Warfield, a “Will & Grace” alum more familiar with the American entertainment industry than a dyed-in-the-wool Brit. “We had a Black story, and the whole thing was American, and there were a lot of women, and I wasn’t any of those things — I was an old fart from England!” says Fellowes, a member of the House of Lords. “But I don’t want it to sound as if Sonja wrote the Black story and I wrote the white, because it wasn’t like that. We both wrote it all and batted our ideas back and forth.”
Warfield, for her part, is passionate about the resulting blend, which mixes life-or-death struggles with minor squabbles and humanizes the insular world of the upper crust. “That’s the human experience — that there is tragedy and there is joy in any era,” Warfield says. “These characters are just like you and me, and they’re going to experience periods of wonder, of joy, of love, of heartbreak.”
Finding a broader audience for those ups and downs nonetheless took a few seasons, giving the production a tentative feel. “Every season has felt like, will there be another one?” says Cynthia Nixon, who plays the idealistic widow Ada Forte. Even as a tightly knit cast of largely New York theater actors — “The Gilded Age” may boast more Tonys per capita than any call sheet in history — cohered into an ensemble, the show remained a cult favorite through Season 2. HBO even trimmed the budget for Season 3 — it was reportedly $100 million for Season 1 — to make the math work and keep the show on the air.
“Every show needs to perform to a degree that matches the price tag,” says Francesca Orsi, executive vice president of HBO programming and head of drama series and films. “So we pared it back and encouraged Julian and Sonja Warfield to capitalize on the emotional intimacy between characters, and not necessarily accentuate the backdrop.” That backdrop, engineered by department heads like production designer Bob Shaw and costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone, remains magnificent. (Shaw is the series’ sole Emmy winner to date.) But it took some maneuvering from executive producer David Crockett, among others, to subtly play up the foreground. “We never felt the difference,” Orsi adds. “The canvas still felt just as lush and extravagant, but it was always about the intimacy of character.”
Not coincidentally, the characters of “The Gilded Age” had evolved and deepened enough by Season 3 for their dramas — petty and existential alike — to carry the show. “It takes time to establish these characters, and establish the world of the Gilded Age,” says Christine Baranski, whose haughty Agnes van Rhijn epitomizes the blue blood establishment that’s appalled by arrivistes like the Russells. “To me, the first season was largely expositional. But by Season 3, the writers, in a sense, earned the right to put their characters through more extremely dramatic situations.” Agnes is a prime example: Since Season 1, she’s been rendered penniless, forced to cede household authority to her younger sister, Ada, in a critical blow to her self-esteem. (In Season 4, events conspire to give Agnes such a fit of pique that Baranski wrote a thank-you note to Fellowes and Warfield for the actorly gift.)
Yet the calibration of “The Gilded Age” is a two-way street. Not only has the show added heft to lighter subplots, like introducing discord to the harmonious Russell marriage; it’s also injected levity into storylines that previously were more sober. No character embodies the latter trend more than Peggy, a dogged journalist who once bore witness to a harrowing lynch mob. Peggy’s still serious about her work, but in the third season, she immersed herself in the romance and luxury that have long been staples for the show’s white protagonists when she met Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), a physician and scion of Newport, Rhode Island’s Black upper class. In the Season 3 finale, the pair got engaged, making their nuptials a highly anticipated event both within the story and for its audience.
“Last season felt like the incredible blossoming of years of planting seeds, and now we’re really getting to start the harvest,” Benton says of what Warfield calls Peggy’s “soft life era,” the fruit of “a really long game” by Benton (who calls herself a “silent co-producer” for the character) and the writers to round out the character and offset the Reconstruction-era racism that seeks to suppress her. “The season that we spent the most time with the Black characters is the season that was the most successful,” Benton says. “I like to think those things were in cahoots.”
As much as the cast enjoyed the Season 3 material, though, they didn’t know just how much it would resonate. “We were really all proceeding as though Season 3 was our last,” says Coon. “Our attitude while the shooting was unfolding was we were kind of sad. We were all trying to remember that it’s not always like this, and that we really like each other, and that our next job could be in Hungary, and trying to maintain our appreciation even when the hours got long.”
The camaraderie endures even in success, and is palpable in a viral clip from June of the cast watching and then raucously celebrating as the New York Knicks pulled off an electric comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. In the video, shared by Nixon on Instagram, Benton, Baranski and others in full regalia (bustles, corsets, the whole nine yards) huddle around the iPad of John Douglas Thompson, who plays Peggy’s father, before the room explodes. “My hat fell off!” Baranski says. “It got us through the night, because that shoot lasted until 4 or 5 in the morning — and that euphoric moment just energized, galvanized the whole cast.”
Everyone has their theories about what’s behind the show’s late-breaking surge. “It’s a bit like making friends,” Fellowes says. “You meet people and you kind of like them, but you probably don’t think about them again. Then you meet them again, and you think about them a little more. Then something brings you together, and finally, you’re friends!” Orsi points to more material factors, like HBO moving “The Gilded Age” from a Monday-night time slot to its more traditional Sunday bloc in Season 2, and the end of the Hollywood strikes allowing the cast to actively promote Season 3. And the positive word of mouth is facilitated by the show’s family-friendly appeal, a relative anomaly on the network that inspired the term “sexposition.”
“HBO is traditionally known for hyper-violent, sexually explicit content — but there’s this show,” Orsi says. “There isn’t overt violence and explicit sexual content, so you find that a multigenerational viewing experience is common.” When the drama’s primary source of tension is what menu to serve a visiting dignitary, there’s no risk of watching a gory beheading with your mom.
Regardless of how “The Gilded Age” hit it big, among the cast there’s a distinct sense of gratitude. “None of us take for granted that getting a fourth season of the show right now is — not exactly a miracle, but you feel like you’re part of a very fortunate minority at this point,” Spector says. Even Baranski, no stranger to extended runs after playing lawyer Diane Lockhart for more than a decade on “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” understands how anomalous the experience has been. “Time is the most precious asset in any situation in life,” she says. “And we live in a culture that just wants things very, very fast, then to throw it away and move on.”
As Skydance employees stare down the barrel of the cost-cutting promised by owner David Ellison to mitigate tens of billions of dollars in merger-related debt, “The Gilded Age” may become even more of an outlier. Ironically, it’s doing so while depicting figures not unlike the Ellisons: titans of industry who use their power and connections to lobby the president for their preferred policies. In Season 4, George and infamous oil magnate John D. Rockefeller (newcomer Neal Huff) debate how to convince President Grover Cleveland (comedian Jim Gaffigan) to spare their conglomerates when regulating monopolies. It’s hard to watch and not think of Ellison and his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, publicly cozying up to our commander-in-chief to secure federal approval for the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“It is kind of staggering how many parallels there are to this moment that we’re in,” says Nixon, a frequent political advocate (and former gubernatorial candidate) who’s been vocal about her opposition to the merger. “All of a sudden, these millionaires — and in our world, billionaires — seemingly coming out of nowhere with this new industry and considering any kind of distribution of wealth as anathema.” The actual Gilded Age is not a particularly well-known historical era (when was the last time you thought about Grover Cleveland?!), but that obscurity just gives the show more chances to excavate it for unexpected insights.
Of course, “The Gilded Age” is far from dissident cinema. George Russell may face off with unions, but he’s still a protagonist; the show takes the perspective of a target for an assassination attempt, not the guy who pulls the trigger. “The Gilded Age” is gently critical of its privileged subjects, when it’s critical at all — and now, that critique is coming from a position of strength. “The thing that I trust about capitalists is that they like making money,” says Spector. “And if the show continues to be valuable, I expect it will continue to be on the air.” Trust Spector to know: He’s spent half a decade inhabiting a character who practices capitalism like a religion.
The question of how long “The Gilded Age” will continue can now be asked with optimism rather than dread. “I want this show to go for 10 seasons if it can,” Orsi says. The show has yet to be officially picked up for Season 5, but she’s already working with Fellowes, Warfield and their writers on ideas for what a sixth season could be. “We’ll go on writing it as long as we’re asked,” Fellowes says — and considering that some historians argue the Gilded Age only ended with the Great Depression, that could be quite a long time: Picture Bertha’s grandson, who arrives in the Season 4 premiere, enlisting to fight in World War I.
“The Gilded Age” may be guided by history, but the show never feels constrained by the past, and its ability to infuse drama and emotion into a distant time is part of the appeal. “There seems to be a fashion now that if you’ve got enough money, you have no other problems,” Fellowes says. “Every human being has problems! Louis XIV had problems!” So did the George Russells of the world, and “The Gilded Age” helps us feel their pain.
