New York is a Cultural Battleground as Brash New Wealth Rattles The Old Guard in HBO’s THE GILDED AGE

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Having a rigid aristocracy based on birth rather than wealth is a big part of European history. But the United States never had such a thing, right? Wrong. Welcome to the world of HBO’s THE GILDED AGE, from British creator/writer/executive producer Julian Fellowes (DOWNTON ABBEY), which debuts Monday Jan. 24, only on Crave. With a vast ensemble cast that includes Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski, Carrie Coon, Louisa Jacobson, Denée Benton, Morgan Spector, Taissa Farmiga, and more, THE GILDED AGE is a nine-episode drama set in New York City in 1882, when times were definitely changing. Today, the U.S. has the reputation of being a nation where money rules. But it will be a revelation to some Americans to realize that wasn’t always the case. There was an established, exclusive high society in New York, based on some of the nation’s founding families, and they were not keen on sharing their world with the ascendant, bold, and brash business-rich families whose wealth admittedly dwarfed their own. During a virtual Q-and-A with the creators and cast of THE GILDED AGE, Fellowes was asked if the show represents the moment when the United States stopped being an unofficial European satellite nation, in terms of customs and concepts of class and culture. “I feel quite strongly about this – I think this was the moment that America really took the reins of its own fate,” Fellowes said. “The New York aristocracy before the Civil War was essentially European-derived, with the Dutch families, Scottish, English. They would sit in circles, making conversation in Washington Square, in a very kind of modest way. But that wasn’t these guys (newly rich capitalists). They turned up in town and built these palaces. They thought they were giants, and they built houses for giants to live in. They wanted an opera house, so they built one. They wanted a museum, so they built one. It was a training ground for the 20th century, less than 20 years away. They were finding the confidence to dominate the Western world. The 20th century belonged to America. Who the 21st century will belong to is anyone’s guess.” THE GILDED AGE begins with the predicament of a young woman named Marian Brook (played by Jacobson, one of Meryl Streep’s three acting daughters). Having grown up in Pennsylvania, Marian is shocked to discover that her recently deceased father hadn’t exactly been truthful about his finances, and Marian is broke. So she moves to New York to live with her aunts Agnes (Baranski) and Ada (Nixon), who are part of that city’s historic upper class. But Marian – who befriends a woman named Peggy Scott (Benton) during the journey to New York – walks face-first into a budding culture clash: right across the street from where Agnes and Ada live, an aggressive and uber-wealthy businessman named George Russell (Spector), and his socially ambitious wife Bertha (Coon), have just moved into their ostentatious new house. Marian is curious about the Russells; Agnes is mortified; and Ada is somewhere in between. “(Ada) is not the kind of role people are used to me playing – people are used to me playing a far more, you know, confrontational, opinionated, intellectual kind of person,” said Nixon, who recently reprised her role as Miranda in HBO Max’s SEX AND THE CITY continuation series, AND JUST LIKE THAT…, which is available on Crave. “It’s such a pivotal moment for Ada. It is, I think, literally the most exciting thing that has ever happened to Ada in her life, the idea that Marian is coming to live with them, and that she has a chance to have a surrogate daughter, and shepherd a young woman at the beginning of her life. And one thing that Ada has is, she’s got her ear to the ground. She’s moving and shaking in her own subtle, under-the-radar way.” Who has their ears to the ground, and how they react, drives the plot in THE GILDED AGE. “I am very interested in American history, it’s very absorbing,” Fellowes said. “This was the American Renaissance. They found a way of doing it their way, and not as a pastiche of the way it would be done in Paris, or London, or Rome. And there is something very attractive in that. I know that some of them were called ‘robber barons’ (a derogatory term for those who used unscrupulous and exploitative methods to amass their wealth). And of course, some of them were monstrous. But they built a society, with their wives playing a big role, that was American, it wasn’t anything else. It was a unique social mixture that hadn’t been tried anywhere else. And in that, you know, there’s something uplifting, whatever the details of it are.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv