It seems that Julian Fellowes may have been listening to the viewers who have said, lovingly or not, that nothing really happens on The Gilded Age. Season three of Fellowes’s prim and elegant soap opera about late 19th-century New Yorkers—which premieres on HBO on June 22—features more scandal, more raw emotion, and even some death and mayhem. But Fellowes has not over-egged the series in the pursuit of intrigue; Gilded Age remains mostly a pleasant, satisfying diversion.
As if to shake us from the stupor of expectation, Fellowes opens the season in an entirely surprising place: the wild west. A wagon charges across the deserts of Arizona, its vast orange expanse a far cry from the stately order of the Upper East Side. But this is where much of the era’s money is being made before it is siphoned back to New York—at least, most of the money made by George Russell (Morgan Spector), the railroad magnate whose nouveau riche family occupies the center of the series. As railways stretch to connect the coasts of America, men like Russell seize the enormous opportunity to develop their empire, betting their whole fortunes in the process.
Back home in the mansions, there’s little sign of the dust and danger that pays for all that opulence. While her husband stakes his claim in the west, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) turns east, toward the English aristocracy Bertha and her cohort so strenuously emulate. She has made a sort of backroom deal (or, really, opera box deal) to marry off her daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), to a British duke in need of a cash transfusion. Bertha, who is of humble extraction, figures that yoking her family to British nobility will finally assert the Russells as international sophisticates, laundering their new money with ancient tradition.
But Gladys doesn’t want to marry some random duke she barely knows. She’s got a genuine love interest puppy-dogging around, a nice boy from a nice family whom Bertha nonetheless deems beneath her family’s ambition. Her son, Larry (Harry Richardson), is also following his heart: he’s smitten not with some wealthy debutante hand selected by his mother, but with his decidedly more humble across-the-street neighbor, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson). Marian’s aunts have had a reversal of fortunes: spinster turned widow Ada (Cynthia Nixon) is now the one with the money, while her imperious sister Agnes (Christine Baranski) has been left penniless after a conwoman fleeced her ne’er-do-well son Oscar (Blake Ritson) out of their fortune. (Gay guys can’t be trusted with money.) Much tension comes from this upending of domestic hierarchy.
Marian’s friend (and Agnes’s secretary) Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) gets in on the mating game, too. She meets a suitable suitor, a handsome doctor from a prominent family, but must square off against his snobby and disapproving mother, played with regal menace by Phyllicia Rashad. This ultimately leads to Rashad having a showdown with her old Raisin in the Sun costar Audra McDonald, as Peggy’s mother Dorothy. It is, overall, a big season for the characters from the Black elite, with Peggy’s love story at the center.
The Gilded Age understands marriage as dynasty’s path to a secured future, as it was for centuries upon centuries. But Fellowes keeps his show tuned to the thrum of progress, steadily gaining volume. Divorce is a hot topic, a scandal that will cast a woman from the upper echelons of society—unless, of course, that society changes with the coaxing of a brash arriviste or two. Other supposed improprieties are discussed and rethought, specifically in a handful of scenes in which characters gingerly approach the topic of homosexuality with something like curiosity and compassion. A new century is rushing at these soon-to-be-dinosaurs, and maybe the old ways, like strategically arranged marriages and social shunning, will no longer do.
But real cultural shift is still a little ways off, and so The Gilded Age stays mostly rooted in tradition. For the rich folks, anyway. Down under the floorboards in the basement kitchens, things are moving more swiftly. Last season, Agnes’s footman Jack (Ben Ahlers) secured a patent for a new kind of alarm clock. That little journey of industry continues apace in season three, a sweet and wistful arc. Fellowes may have a strange attitude about the poor—on this show and on Downton Abbey, he routinely suggests a kind of happy poverty, the cozy pleasure of knowing one’s station in life—but he manages a convincingly complex evolution for Jack.
This season also has a bit of darker stuff, a pair of shocking scenes that disrupt the polite temperament of the show. One is a freak accident, the other an act of violence unlike anything Fellowes has done before. Both events may be melodramatic, but they also considerably liven the proceedings—connecting The Gilded Age to mortal risk, which the show’s characters have long seemed ignorant of or immune to. This is America, after all; violence is baked into the foundation.
Fear not, though. The season is still largely about parties and luncheons and furtive glances of longing and affection. It is about hats and bustles and corsets and sharp suits and carefully molded hair. And it is about codes of behavior in which Fellowes sees genuine tragedy—all that restriction, all those love affairs scuttled, all the access denied—but also a certain beauty. Fellowes’s devotion to rigid custom has always made his television shows fascinating objects for meta study. We learn something of Fellowes’s own moral principle, his peccadillos, his sometimes priggish fixations, as we discover those of Gilded Age society. Season three suggests that Fellowes, too, may be evolving, pushing himself into a wider understanding of the world, with all the new allowances that come with that broader perspective. Cities change; so do writers.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
How Private-Equity Billionaires Killed the American Dream
-
Donald Trump “Wants to Demonstrate Absolute Power”
-
Alex Cooper Breaks Her Silence
-
The Chaos Inside Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s Wedding
-
Molly Gordon’s So Much More Than The Bear’s Dream Girl
-
The Dizzying Rise of MAHA Warrior Calley Means
-
From RFK Jr. to Patrick Schwarzenegger, a Brief Guide to the Kennedy Family
-
The 42 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time
-
From the Archive: OceanGate’s Last Descent
The post In The Gilded Age Season 3, Divorce, Death, and Violence Come Calling appeared first on Vanity Fair.
