The facts of Julian Fellowes’s HBO series The Gilded Age are pleasant on their own: The biggest arc for season two is the Opera War, in which the future of New York society is fought via a proxy battle for box seats at the opera, with a lightly fictionalized Vanderbilt figure named Mrs. Russell (Carrie Coon) squaring up against a slightly less fictionalized Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy). There’s a plot where a servant invents an alarm clock, an ongoing romance arc for an underwhelming niece who’s just around all the time, and an entire arm of the series attempting to deal with the lives of Black New Yorkers in the 1880s and utterly failing to integrate that element with the rest of the show. Fellowes, best known for his previous TV show, Downton Abbey, has doubled down on his love of low-stakes melodrama while nudging any ideas of substance to the margins.
The facts are fun, sure, but the bigger question about The Gilded Age is really about the experience of it. It is bad, and yet … few things are more enjoyable to watch right now?
- It’s truly challenging to think of a TV series from the last five years that more fully realizes Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” It’s not just that The Gilded Age “converts the serious into the frivolous,” as Sontag notes in her introduction, although this quality of the series deserves its own moment of careful consideration. It’s the ineffable sense of innocence about what this series is, a convincing unconsciousness of its own absurd impulse toward excess and empty aestheticization. “Pure Camp,” Sontag writes, “is always naïve.” All appreciation of The Gilded Age stems from this fundamental understanding: that while certain actors or other participants may be quite knowing about what this show is and how it operates, the chief creative gestalt comes from a complete lack of self-knowledge.
2. Luke Forte gets married to Ada, dies immediately, and then out of the blue she finds a letter in his stuff that reads, essentially, “oh btw I am the heir to a textile fortune.” A textile fortune! The Van Rhijns are ruined after Oscar Van Rhijn invests all their money in a scam, and then at the last second they’re saved by magical carpets that appear out of thin air. MAGIC! CARPETS!
3. Not once, but several times during Downton Abbey, there’s a mysterious letter that arrives or is found or gets translated by someone, and the discovery of that letter is what makes everything okay. A solicitor sends a letter, which everyone argues about, which gives Matthew Crawley enough inheritance to stay at Downton. There’s another whole to-do about a letter from the Prince of Wales. Mr. Bates has a letter-writing situation with Anna. After all of that, Julian Fellowes gets to this new series and simply cannot stop himself from even more shocking discoveries of letters. There’s last season’s baby-given-up-for-adoption plot, and then this season’s last-minute inheritance letter. Single pieces of paper get shuffled around a post office and every good or bad part of human existence hinges on whether or not someone opens an envelope.
4. Every single one of the glorious gowns these women wear has an egregious zipper seam going up the back, even though the Metropolitan Opera opened in 1883 and zippers were not commercially available until the 1920s. This could be interpreted as laziness or a lack of care about detail. I prefer to see it two ways: One is that I believe the cute kid who invented the alarm clock is also quietly inventing zippers on the side. The other is that somewhere inside production there’s a costume designer who was like, You know what, wearing a new gown for every damn scene of this show isn’t period-appropriate either! No one has time for this shit! Zippers for everyone! [EDIT: Since publication, I have learned that the back closures of these dresses use hook and eye fasteners rather than zippers, but that the hook and eye seams look identical to zippers from afar and are still placed in the back for the ease of on-set logistics. This is, improbably, an even more glorious example of camp in action: the insistence that an unseen element retain historical plausibility, even while its actual placement and visible presence signifies, to every modern viewer, an anachronism. As Sontag notes, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.” These closures are not zippers, but they are still “zippers.”]
5. Few television series have the utter unwavering confidence required to put a performance as charisma-free as Louisa Jacobson’s at the center of a series. I see it as a commentary on the show’s favorite themes, a way of enacting an absence at the core of this world while everyone around her is 4,000 times more interesting.
6. The Gilded Age functions via a wholesale inversion of dramatic stakes. This is an extension of the Sontag observation about turning serious things into trivial ones, but for The Gilded Age, it has more to do with its ability to defang any serious topic within moments, while also investing immense energy into nonsense. Things that should be enormous do not actually matter all that much (a massive labor movement; getting married late in life and then being widowed immediately; racial segregation; the invention of electricity; financial ruin). Things that do not matter at all are treated like earth-shaking cataclysms. This is how you get a show where the prospect of a duke eating bad soup becomes an unthinkable crisis.
7. The chief wish-fulfillment of The Gilded Age is not desire for immense wealth, or wanting to live in a world where nothing truly bad ever happens, or even the painful longing for an idea of New York City where everything is beginning, where great institutions are being invented rather than grimly crumbling into disrepair. The main appeal is the show’s permission to care most about silly nonsense, to spend untold energy on who goes to what opera, and to dismiss issues like racial violence as one brief, unfortunate speed bump. Who among us does not wish that existential terror or real injustice could be so easily dismissed? Who does not want permission to care more about who gets a central box seat than about crushing economic inequality?
This show invented an entire Duke of Buckingham MacGuffin figure who has no personality, no opinions, no motives, no desires, and no tasks at all except to go to events. He could be a cardboard standee with a “Hi, I’m the Duke” name tag and nothing would change.
8. Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector very clearly know what this show is, and watching them both commit to it with their whole damn bodies is inspiring. If this show gets a third season, I pray Audra McDonald finally gets material that will give her the same opportunity for unadulterated batshittery.
9. Mrs. Fish!
10. It is so beautifully telling that the ending cliffhanger of season two has nothing to do with grief, race, New York society, the Gilded Age as a time period or representation of American culture, or even a big twist in a romance plot. In the end, Luke Forte’s Magic Carpets mean that nothing will change at all for the Van Rhijns except that there will be an infinitesimal shift in power between two grown adult sisters. When the butler turns to Miss Ada and asks her whether he should go tell the servants they still have their jobs, it’s like an anvil has dropped through the ceiling. This is the field of engagement this show understands. This is the level of conflict it can grapple with. The prospect of these two sisters pecking away at each other, but in a slightly different way than before, is the most thrilling thing this show can fathom. In its own way, it’s a heartwarming vision of the world. It’s also so dumb! If that’s the wrong way to watch TV, I don’t want to be right.
