TV review: The striving and the snobbery is off the scale in The Gilded Age
Christine Baranski as Agnes van Rhijn & Cynthia Nixon as Ada Brook
Will we ever get fed up watching super-rich types on the telly? Probably, if The Gilded Age (Sky Atlantic and Now TV) is anything to go by.
The new period drama by Julian Fellowes, the man responsible for , is pitched at those of us who love a show about women in uncomfortable dresses. The only problem is that it’s set in 1880s New York and everyone is some shade of awful.
was like an ad for the British aristocracy. As long as you had an ancestor who was well in with William the Conqueror, you’d be alright. We lapped it up because the family at the centre of the show, the Crawleys, ate a full English breakfast every day in a dress suit and then went upstairs to get dressed for lunch. If any of them had a job, it was to point at some oik from the village and tell them to put that over there. Who wouldn’t want a bit of that?
is much busier. There’s a lot more striving and the snobbery is off the scale. It centres around two families living opposite each other on 5th Avenue. The Russells have just built a minor palace with their new money. Two old money sisters, Agnes and Ada, live across the road. Agnes hates the Russells and their new money, telling her niece Marian that she can have visitors to their house, as long as they are ‘old New York.’
It’s all just a bit flat. There’s no fizz or energy in , it feels like the actors are just reading their lines in a dress rehearsal. I think the problem might be the costumes. They’re just not cool, in the way that the 1920s clobber in made you want to head out to a vintage clothes shop. Late 19th century New York is never coming back into fashion.
needs someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg. (It could be a good move for him.) Someone who exudes entitlement and languor, rather than all that striving and worrying what people think. Without Jacob, it just feels like with footmen.
The story-telling is daft as well, which is a waste, because there’s a great cast, including Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon.
The story starts with the niece Marian leaving rural Pennsylvania to go live with her aunts in posh New York. She arrives with an African American woman called Dorothy Scott — they met in a random encounter on a railway platform. The next day, Dorothy has moved in with the aunts and is working as a secretary for one of them. I know had some plastic plot-lines, but this feels like it was put together in 30 seconds.
It’s all very second-rate soap opera. You can see they’ve put plenty money into . But judging by these dreary people on 5th Avenue, money isn’t everything.
