11 Brief Meditations on Why I Love The Gilded Age

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? Therefore, on the occasion of the conclusion of its second and hopefully not final season, some meditations on the joys and puzzles of The Gilded Age:

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