“The golden age” is a poor period drama

In the HBO drama “The Gilded Age”, the characters are perfectly aware that they live in interesting moments. At the start of the series, which takes place in the eighteen years, a lawyer of the succession observes that fortunes to a million dollars are made and lost per day in the rail sector. One of his titans, the thief Baron George Russell (Morgan Spector), plans an express line that will allow the substantive transport at an unprecedented rate. Thomas Edison realizes the once fantastic notion of an entire building illuminated by electricity, and Oscar Wilde charms the aristocracy of New York with his Witticisms, if not his pieces. The promise in the air inspires immigrants, trade unionists, suffrages and an increasing black bourgeoisie. But although “the golden age”, which returned for its third season on Sunday, alludes to all these historical developments, it is mainly occupied by the social climbing efforts of the wife of George, Bertha (Carrie Coon), who has a hell on the domination of Manhattan High Society. Although a whole city is signaling, the first season depends in part to know if the neighbor of Russells – the Huffy, at the old Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) – will never cross the sixty and first street to visit.

The expression “the golden age” was borrowed from the novel by Mark Twain in 1873 of the same name, a political satire on materialism and the corruption of the years which followed the civil war. The era is frequently invoked to explain the inequality soaring our time. But the creator of “The Gilded Age”, Julian Fellowes – in which the drama of the previous period, “Downton Abbey”, aroused criticism as Rose Colored for the British aristocracy – is resolved in his goal on the beauty of the cupboard. It is difficult to think of another series currently in the air as sumptuous or empty. The joke of a businessman that banks are like women – they “panic unimportant and ignore the essential elements” – is supposed to scan as gross but inadvertently summarizes many scenarios of the program. Many series have managed to make frivolity significant, or at least fun. But so little in fact occursEpisode of the episode, that “the gilded age” is barely qualified as a soap opera: when the Russell and Van Rhijn Majordomas begin passive-debt from the aggression of salad forks and teaspoons, it is clear that we are supposed to feast on waste.

Part of the problem is that there was no real participation in the procedure. Other series on ultra-rich, such as “succession” and “white lotus”, illustrate how money cannot protect against emotional (or even physical) damage; If anything, the riches of the characters make them more vulnerable. “The golden age” takes place during an extreme flow period, and the variability of the fate of its characters is supposed to be at the heart of its premise. The wait takes place at the start of the series, when an alderman who tries to swindle George failed in the process, then kills himself in shame. But nothing so consecutive has happened since – if the ruin is never looming, it does not stay. Towards the end of the second season, for example, the son of Agnes, Oscar (Blake Ritson), loses family fortune. Oscar, who is in the closet, spent the series looking for a rich heiress through which he can maintain his lifestyle; The woman he chooses turns out to be directing his own plan, with disastrous repercussions for Van Rhijns. His widowed mother suddenly faces the prospect of selling her house and living her last years with her sister, Ada (Cynthia Nixon), in disastrous straits, while her cleaning staff must manage for themselves. The torsion is one of the rare satisfactory developments in the show: Comeppance for a potential conniver! And then, in the next episode, thanks to an unexpected inheritance in the unexpected Ada, the family’s money problems are instantly over. The niece of Agnes and Ada exults that “nothing needs to change”.

The series is not entirely unconscious of the myopia of its characters. During the first season, Bertha focuses on the minute trees of her daughter Gladys in society while her husband faces the possibility of imprisonment, and the George before Uxorielle finds her more and more ridiculous. During the new season, when Bertha believes that she found the right match for Gladys – an English Duke whose title of the old world would give the Russells new money a social Trump card – she acts more like a Madame than a mother, Icily rejecting the feelings of the girl in order to conclude the agreement. But Fellowes refuses to treat it as a heel turn, even clumsily transforming Bertha into a proto-feminist who fights against female suffrage during a dinner and risks his own social status to defend divorced women. The redemption attempt is never quite true.

This does not help that the likes repeatedly reach the same small bag of towers. Even with the readings of flawless lines of Baranski, it is only so many times that we can expect to be amused by Agnes nicknning things “Fiddle-Faddle” or “Hobbledehoys” or scandalized by, say, the new prospect of hot soup for lunch. She is an obvious successor to the dowager countess of Maggie Smith on “Downton”, and not the only replacement which reaches a decreasing point of yield; The upstairs contrast was the key to the appeal of the previous program, but the secrets that are forever admitted to tears by the servants of “the golden age” does not replace the inner life. (The PEGGY DENE BENTON, the only black head, is the only member of “the help” to stand out, but it moves so far from the Enclaves de Manhattan and Newport where the rest of the series is established that it often has the impression that it is on a different program.) On the higher floors, the commitments are made and broken with the regularity of a Swiss clock.

In this season, however, the consequences finally arrive. It is not a coincidence that it is the strongest in the series. The seeds planted at the start is materialized – Bertha’s ruthless ambition leading to the formerly unthinkable crackup of Russell’s marriage. On the other side of the street, the foundations of the house of Van Rhijn are also shaken after the unexpected sleeve of Ada allows him to challenge Agnes at the head of the household. These intrigues authorize the unpredictability to all that the spectacle had initially promised: “the golden age” will not force any of its characters to give up the gold, but their luxurious surroundings are now the backdrop of more serious misfortunes.

Fellowes even allows some of these characters to show more complicated emotions. At the end of the season, an irreversible calamity do Strike: One of Oscar’s lovers is killed, and he could not express to his family the extent of his grief because he cannot reveal the nature of their relationship. Even after the arc has resolved, the brutality of its sorrow dwells. For all references to real characters and historical events, this fictitious rhythm is one of the rare times when “the golden age” offers a real idea of ​​what it had to be to live in such a time. The rest is violin. ♦