‘The Gilded Age’ Finds in Past Glories a Civilized Respite From Our Partisan Present

Around the middle of the latest “Gilded Age” season on HBO — the first episode of season four premiered last night — young Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) is buckling under a series of personal and professional pressures.An elegant dinner with his business titan father George (a simmering Morgan Spector) and headstrong, social-climbing mother (the transcendent Carrie Coon) quickly gets messy, leaving Larry angry and adrift.The scene actually calls to mind a passage from the famous 1873 satire that lends the show, and era, its name. The “paths to fortune are innumerable and all open,” Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote in “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” The young American, they continued, “has no traditions to bind him or guide him; and his impulse is to break away from the occupation his father has followed, and make a new way for himself.”HBO’s “Gilded Age” — created by Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame — both challenges and reinforces this credo that we’ve come to call the “American Dream;” that you should not only do whatever you want however you want, but also rise higher than your parents while doing it.“The Gilded Age” brilliantly exploits such expectations for tension, melodrama, and — most important of all — sympathy. Another son in the new season (Blake Ritson as Oscar van Rhijn) is also determined to break free from bonds of family and tradition.But he can only do so while keeping secrets, and conspiring with another rebel (Kelley Curran), who’s suffered her own barrage of slings and arrows. What “The Gilded Age” ultimately does so well is cultivate sympathy for pretty much its entire cast — no easy task without a dastardly villain to make everyone look better.The show has become a civilized respite from our highly partisan age of rage, with its seemingly endless supply of villains we never stop screaming about. The lush set design and wardrobe also help, especially at a time when even captains of industry wear jeans and hoodies, and Manhattan’s swankiest streets are filled with people wearing pajamas and Crocs.Yet for those who take their history seriously, “The Gilded Age” can elicit more mixed feelings. Mr. Fellowes pays lots of attention to time-period details, but history is one of the main battlefronts in the 21st-century’s relentless culture wars.The soft focus of the show might, for some, seem like an evasion of harsh truths about poverty, racism, and oppression. Season four eventually takes viewers into noisy settlement houses, and one-room shacks at the end of dark alleyways, for a glimpse of “how the other half lives,” to use the title of Jacob Riis’ classic, written and published during the very years when “The Gilded Age” is set.But we only see this underclass because elites like George Russell and Van Rhijn niece Marian Brook have become enmeshed in these harder lives.A few years back, a fascinating Cinemax medical drama attempted a grittier glimpse into New York’s past. “The Knick” — directed and co-produced by Steven Soderbergh, among others — only lasted two ambitious yet uneven seasons, whereas “The Gilded Age” will likely run for as long as Julian Fellowes wants it to.The new season opens in the mid-1880s. Construction of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor is nearly complete, and President Grover Cleveland (comedian Jim Gaffigan) is planning a visit to Manhattan, which, as season four progresses, will turn the city’s social scene upside down.Once again, we glimpse into the lives of a diverse cross-section of 19th-century New Yorkers — the upper-crust Russells and Van Rhijns, but also the striving African American journalist Peggy Scott and her doctor husband; the Irish and German immigrants who actually run these affluent homes, as well as their former co-worker, Jack Trotter, a striver out to make his own fortune, despite a humble background and conspicuous “Noo Yawk” accent.Relations between the domestic staff and their employers also could have been a source of intense conflict. But most of the struggles in “The Gilded Age” are private and personal. They leave us wanting to gossip rather than take to the streets.In the end, what mainly makes “The Gilded Age work is the extraordinary cast, as impressive a collection of talent anywhere on TV today. And so, for an hour a week, between now and Christmas, “Gilded Age” devotees will go back in time, learn a little history, and see compelling people dressed beautifully, bickering, and falling in or out of love.Early in episode one, Larry and Marian are in a horse carriage when a terrible thunderstorm strikes, making further travel impossible. It’s tempting to ask: How did this pair with a romantic past avoid getting splashed by all the mud and horse waste on New York’s unpaved streets? But all we really care about is what’s going to happen at the hotel where they must spend the night.

‘The Gilded Age’ Finds in Past Glories a Civilized Respite From Our Partisan Present

‘The Gilded Age’ Finds in Past Glories a Civilized Respite From Our Partisan Present

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