‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 Offers Mild Intrigue, Majestically

The very end of the second season of HBO’s The Gilded Age (premiering October 29) features a plot twist both ridiculous and totally predictable. I couldn’t help but grin as this silly final scene unfolded, an effect familiar to any of us who have spent time gloopily enamored of The Gilded Age or its predecessor, Downton Abbey. Both series, from creator Julian Fellowes, are polite and easy to the point of absurdity. Yet there is giddy pleasure in their busybody airiness, a soothing order that ignores many problems of these shows’ eras while amiably distracting us from our own. 

The Gilded Age is perhaps more cognizant of social ills than its British cousin. Set in 1880s New York City (with some merry jaunts to Newport), the show confronts matters of race more directly via Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), who is advancing her career as a reporter for a prominent Black newspaper when she gets an assignment that brings her to the perilous south. (Whether The Gilded Age handles that storyline with as much tact and specificity as is required will be a matter of some debate.) The show, through Peggy’s eyes, is also careful to point out that the north was not some equitable paradise for people of color. 

That said, the immediate issues that Peggy encounters are solved about as quickly (and, in New York, as genially) as those of her white counterparts. But there is at least some vague consciousness of the extremity of social difference between Peggy and her friend Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), the niece of prickly dowager Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and her spinster sister, Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon). In this run of episodes, Marian must struggle with nothing more serious than a part-time job as an art teacher (where she is, of course, beloved by her students) and the romantic overtures of a kind, handsome widower. 

The gap between Peggy’s world and Marian’s is linked together in one material way: the Brooklyn Bridge is nearing completion, a significant development that represents a city in the heady lurch of progress. To a lesser extent, so does the founding of the Metropolitan Opera, then an upstart, ever-so-slightly more egalitarian rival to the venerable and exclusive Academy of Music. Leading the Met charge is new-money conniver Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), the ruthlessly ambitious wife of equally ruthless railroad magnate George (Morgan Spector). While we root for these climbers, because they are in some bizarre fashion the underdogs, The Gilded Age does not ignore the fact that George’s real-world analogs were mostly horrible union busters. A labor struggle dominates much of George’s time in season two, and while he is not depicted as the worst kind of tycoon, he is not shown to be the best, either. 

On and on Fellowes’s moral equivocating goes, just self-aware enough to prevent The Gilded Age from being an outright endorsement of aristocratic might. In keeping the show light, Fellowes is able to hold everything in the realm of fantasy. No searing social drama is this, nor is it trying to be. In the second season, romances bloom and wither, a duke of England is courted by rival society queens, one family’s financial position becomes suddenly dire, and a member of a household staff invents an alarm clock. It should be a little boring, all this lo-fi bustling and business. But the spell cast is more softly narcotic than it is soporific—it’s relaxing, not tedious. 

A cast of New York theater legends helps keep things lively, all seeming to relish in the chance to put on some fine costumes and swan around with old-timey decorum. Nixon is particularly affecting this season, as Ada’s life is irrevocably altered by the arrival of a new character, one who gives Ada the kind of attention she’s long craved. Fellowes may still be rather mean to poor Ada, but Nixon convinces us of her dignity. 

That plot line is about as poignant as the season gets. Though I must admit that something like a swell of pure emotion almost overtook me when watching the sequence in which the Brooklyn Bridge’s opening is announced with a glorious fireworks show. There all our little dopes are, looking wide-eyed up at the sky and marveling at the dawning of yet another new era. (If you’ll remember, last season’s most moving scene involved the electrical lighting of a building.) Fellowes is quite good at building a sense of occasion like this, capturing a moment of awe as small and finite people gaze upon time itself, rushing along. 

That is season two’s only truly grandiose event. While the show’s relentless and over-indicating (in a good way) score might suggest that everything on The Gilded Age is of high importance, it really is just nicely packaged frivolity. The show may fail some HBO standard, but it is nonetheless a welcome respite from the grime and wallow of so much fancy television. 

The Gilded Age is broader, less intimate than Downton Abbey—and how could it not be, with three families involved, plus the attendant maids and butlers? It nonetheless draws us into a similar coziness, that immersion into faraway lives of either ridiculous comfort or contented penury. Season two does try to bring history to bear on some of these people—Peggy fighting for purchase in a bigoted world, George doing the dirty business of staying rich—but for the most part, it sets everyone twirling around in a diverting dream. Bridges are built, operas are sung. And the alarm clock works—without ever really waking anyone.