The Gilded Age just wrapped season 3 and Julian Fellowes’ juicy historical drama is more popular than ever with audiences. The Gilded Age has enjoyed climbing ratings week-to-week, culminating in The Gilded Age season 3’s finale netting a record 5-million viewers across multiple platforms. Audiences can’t get enough of The Gilded Age.
HBO has renewed The Gilded Age for season 4, and the series is only just hitting its stride creatively. The Gilded Age has shed unpopular characters and awkward storylines that didn’t connect with audiences. The Gilded Age season 3 was more confident and lavish, centering on Bertha Russell’s (Carrie Coon) unwavering quest to marry her daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) to the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb).
Thankfully, The Gilded Age shows no signs of slowing down, with season 3’s ending delivering crowd-pleasing moments like Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) giving her sister, Ada Forte (Cynthia Nixon), her just due as head of the family, and signs that the newly wealthy ex-footman Jack Trotter (Ben Ahlers) could find love with housemaid Bridget (Taylor Richardson).
Here are five major reasons why The Gilded Age is more popular than ever.
5. The Gilded Age Is A Perfect Escape From Modern Life
With its lavish ball gowns for women and dapper suits and tuxedoes for men, The Gilded Age presents an elegance and sophistication that’s lacking in our everyday lives. The Russells, Van Rhijns, Buckinghams and other families in The Gilded Age suffer heartbreak, joy, and even divorce in season 3, but they also possess a surety of social order that is both comforting and alluring.
Life seems simpler in The Gilded Age, although the myriad rules and hazards of late 19th century New York high society are deceptively complex, and often unforgiving. But if all gets to be too much, The Gilded Age’s characters can always escape to their seaside Newport, Rhode Island mansions, and they take us along for the ride.
4. Broadway’s Finest Actors Make Up The Gilded Age’s Cast
Millions of HBO viewers may not have the opportunity to travel to New York City to enjoy a Broadway play, but The Gilded Age brings Broadway to audiences for the simple cost of an HBO Max subscription. The Gilded Age’s cast is absolutely stacked with the theatre’s finest actors. From Christine Baranski, to Morgan Spector, to Donna Murphy, to Blake Ritson, to Denee Brown, it’s a who’s who of the Great White Way.
Each season of The Gilded Age continues to add even more firepower from stage and screen, and season 3 outdid itself by bringing in Phylicia Rashad and Jordan Donica as Mrs. Elizabeth Kirkland and her defiant son, Dr. William Kirkland. Merritt Wever as Bertha’s sister Monica, Hattie Morahan as Lady Sarah Vere, and Nicole Brydon Bloom returning as Maud Beaton were also standouts in season 3.
3. The Gilded Age Has Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey Pedigree
Many viewers of The Gilded Age are also fans of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes’ legendary ITV and Masterpiece PBS TV series, which has spawned three feature films. Other than hoping for a yet-unrealized Downton Abbey crossover with The Gilded Age, Downton fans have enjoyed how Fellowes has applied his same winning formula to The Gilded Age while properly tailoring HBO’s series to its American setting and time period.
From the competing butlers, Church (Jack Gilpin) and Bannister (Simon Jones), to gossiping housemaids, to treacherous lady’s maids, The Gilded Age speaks in Julian Fellowes’ familiar voice, just like Downton Abbey.
2. The Gilded Age Has Pleasingly Low Stakes (But They’re Getting Higher)
The Gilded Age‘s low stakes is one of the show’s most endearing aspects. From the will-they/won’t-they marry dilemma between Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) and Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), to Aurora Fane’s (Kelli O’Hara) painful divorce, to who was leaking Bertha Russell’s gossip to the press, The Gilded Age makes soap opera clichés dramatically addictive.
Each season of The Gilded Age has culminated in a lavish ball, or a resplendent opera war in The Gilded Age season 2, and Bertha Russell has emerged triumphant every time. However, The Gilded Age season 3 has also upped the ante, adding life-or-death stakes that have galvanized the series.
1. The Gilded Age Is Unabashedly Romantic
When The Gilded Age wants to – and thankfully, it often does – the series can send audiences’ hearts soaring with romance. Characters like Marian Brook, Peggy Scott, and Gladys Russell suffer when their high hopes are dashed by cruel reality, but The Gilded Age will offer salvation and proves that love can still conquer all.
Gladys’ marriage to Hector, Duke of Buckingham seemed to be fraught with peril, but with her mother’s help, Gladys prevailed and, against all odds, forged a happy marriage with her doting Duke. The Buckinghams are now pregnant at the end of The Gilded Age season 3, making Gladys the series’ first major character to be with child.
Perhaps no one in The Gilded Age has carried pain and guilt for as long as Peggy Scott, but her beau, Dr. William Kirkland, proved himself true blue. The only dry eye in their Newport Ball was William’s mother, Elizabeth’s, when Dr. Kirkland proposed to Miss Scott. Romance is alive and well in The Gilded Age, and season 4 of Julian Fellowes’ wildly popular HBO series cannot come soon enough.
