From left: Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski and Louisa Jacobson in The Gilded Age Courtesy of HBO Julian Fellowes has received yet more Emmy nominations for the third season ofThe Gilded Age, his opulent HBO drama about a clash between entrenched aristocratic families and ambitious newcomers in 1880s high- society America.
But the way the Oscar- and Emmy-winning creator of the period drama tells it, The Gilded Age is also a love letter to the promise of a rising America after the Civil War and near the turn of the 20th century, an America of glitter and glamour the English screenwriter came to admire as a young man coming of age in postwar Britain.
Related Stories
TV The Emmys Rules Are Excluding Tons of Great International TV
TV 'Masked Singer,' 'The Traitors,' 'Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal' Among Juried Emmy Award Winners
The series, set in late 19th century New York City, sees Christine Baranski as the tradition-bound Agnes van Rhijn and Cynthia Nixon her softer sister Ada, representing old-guard elites. Carrie Coon’s Bertha Russell, on the other hand, is a fierce high-society newcomer who, along with her industrialist husband, George (Morgan Spector), seeks to rule the social class.
The series’ third season, which received eight Emmy nods this year, climaxed with George cheating death after being shot in the penultimate episode, only for Team Russell to no longer be the resident Gilded Age power couple by season’s end. Instead, Bertha sees her world suddenly falling apart as she looks out the window to a fleeing husband, seeking to distance himself from her ruthless social climbing in the finale’s final scene.
“My belief about television is it allows for a longer and gentler development of the relationship between the program and the audience than a movie,” says Fellowes. “Television is, in a way, slower and of course at times a more haunting thing. I’m rather enjoying the fact that we’ve been nominated before, but this is the most nominations we’ve gotten on the third season, and that seems to me to be going in the right direction.”
Of course, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) revealing her pregnancy in the third-season finale begs the question: Will motherhood leave the Russells’ daughter happy and thriving as a wife and duchess after reluctantly walking down the aisle with the English Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb), as her mother wished?
And there’s the uncertainty of the Russells’ son Larry (Harry Richardson) breaking up with or becoming engaged to Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobson). Peggy (Denée Benton), however, got her fairy-tale ending after a season of scrutiny over her past when Dr. Kirkland (Jordan Donica) proposed to her at the Black society ball.
For Fellowes, the dreamy lives his series’ characters lead epitomize the American dream and the spirit of self-invention that resonated with him in England. He credits the success of The Gilded Age to HBO giving his period drama the scale it required after the series’ development had been parked first at ITV and then NBC. He also had the fortune of the COVID-19 pandemic making veteran stage actors and Tony Award winners like Baranski, Nixon, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, Kelli O’Hara and Nathan Lane available after Broadway went dark.
Having so much invested in the promise of America as a dreamland, Fellowes admits to feeling sadness over its decline as an empire in recent years. “That was a very golden period of my life and, in a way, America’s support released me because, once all that happened, I was asked to write a show on Broadway, and it was quite a big hit and I was off to the races,” Fellowes recalls.
Against that career gratitude, he adds, “When I feel America is going through a period of unpopularity, whether it’s merited or not, it saddens me. I feel like a parent, I suppose, and my child is being given trouble and I want to defend it.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
