Though Julian Fellowes’ tale of New York aristos never fizzes as it should, you will still swallow it whole … even if it feels wrong with every fibre of your being
aster morning in Newport, Rhode Island. Playground of the gilded age, where the great and not-remotely-good of New York decamp to their European-inspired estates for another season of more of the same. Which, to distil this review down to its parfum-ed essence, also describes season two of The Gilded Age. More lavish parties. More Agnes van Rhijn pushing withering sentences out of her perennially pursed lips such as: “I like ice-cream. It doesn’t mean I eat it 24 hours a day.
We’re a nation well-versed in the Downton Abbey-fication of the past. It’s our thing. Perhaps the only thing we have left. So we know how season two starts and means to go on. With tight aerial shots of hats plucked from hat boxes. The elite promenading up a pristinely recreated street. Some hot new characters, like the kind-eyed rector from Boston , on the hunt for an authentic New England clam chowder. And, hello there dear Ada Brook , perhaps a wife.
History is a mere trifle compared with such profound struggles. But season two is less – how would Fellowes put it? –than season one. It knows where it wants to go: straight to the top strata of society. The many layers below – such as, say, the 12 million immigrants who came to the US between 1870 and 1900 – get less of a look-in. This is a missed opportunity: the gilded age was defined, after all, by extremes.
It’s better on race. Sort of. Peggy Scott , now a journalist at the New York Globe, goes on a perilous trip to Tuskegee, Alabama to cover the opening of part of the first black college in the land. Racism in the north also features when she reports on the battle to keep New York’s “coloured” schools open. But this story of solidarity, between the growing black middle-class and Irish immigrant populations, is passed over perfunctorily, like a lady of a certain age at a debutante ball.
And yet. Fellowes’ conservatism is served with just enough perspective to prevent it tipping over into a complete endorsement of the establishment. Americans go wild for this very British view, as the residents of Fifth Avenue once did, which is why Downton Abbey remains among the top PBS dramas of all time, and The Gilded Age will be watched by millions. We’re not immune to its relaxant side-effects either.
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