Golden apple

TV Se­ries

The cre­ator of the fa­mous Down­ton Abbey, Ju­lian Fel­lowes, re­turns to tele­vi­sion with an­other pe­riod drama. In this case it is set in New York in the time pe­riod called the Gilded Age, a golden age for the city in the late 19th cen­tury. Fel­lowes had al­ways wanted to do a kind of Down­ton pre­quel, and at some point he con­sid­ered telling how Count Robert Craw­ley and his wife, the Amer­i­can Cora, met and fell in love. Fi­nally, the new se­ries does not draw on these char­ac­ters but it does enter a world that has al­ways fas­ci­nated the di­rec­tor and screen­writer: the mo­ment just after the US civil war when the great Amer­i­can fam­i­lies began to set­tle in Man­hat­tan and lay the ground­work for New York City to be­come the epi­cen­tre of the world, and for the US to con­sol­i­date it­self as the world’s new lead­ing power. It was a time of great for­tunes, and dy­nas­ties such as Astor, Van­der­bilt and Rock­e­feller. It was a world of prej­u­dice and glam­our, which Mar­tin Scors­ese por­trayed in The Age of In­no­cence in all its splen­dor.

In fact, with­out a doubt one of the strengths of the se­ries is its pro­duc­tion de­sign: the sets and cos­tumes are spec­tac­u­lar and re­ally take us back to 1882, the time when the story be­gins. We meet Mar­ian, a young woman from a small Penn­syl­va­nia town who has to leave her home when her fa­ther dies, bur­dened with debt. The girl goes to live in New York with her aunts: Agnes, a wealthy widow be­long­ing to high so­ci­ety, and Ada, a sin­gle woman who is com­pletely de­pen­dent on her sis­ter’s char­ity.

The cast lives up to the ex­pec­ta­tions of a major pro­duc­tion: the young Ma­rina is played by Louisa Ja­cob­son, Meryl Streep’s el­dest daugh­ter; Chris­tine Baran­ski (The Good Fight) plays Agnes, and Cyn­thia Nixon (Sex in New York) is Ada.

Mar­ian’s ar­rival in New York co­in­cides with an­other ar­rival. Op­po­site the sis­ters’ house, the Rus­sell fam­ily has built a large man­sion with the wealth ac­crued through the busi­ness deal­ings of the fa­ther, George, a rail­way in­dus­tri­al­ist. His wife, Bertha (Car­rie Coon, The Left­overs), is an am­bi­tious woman who aims to get into high so­ci­ety using her money. How­ever, she will find all sorts of op­po­si­tion among the most pow­er­ful fam­i­lies, who value old tra­di­tions above all and dis­ap­prove of moder­nity.

In the midst of this war of in­trigue and sab­o­tage among the rich, the younger mem­bers es­tab­lish re­la­tion­ships with each other. Mar­ian meets the Rus­sell broth­ers, Larry and Gladys, while she fights with her strict and tense Aunt Agnes. She also be­friends Peggy, a black girl with fam­ily prob­lems who ends up as a sec­re­tary for Agnes. Through this char­ac­ter played by Denée Ben­ton we see how racism and dis­crim­i­na­tion works in this world. It re­mains to be seen if the se­ries will be­come a phe­nom­e­non like Dow­ton Abbey. For now, we know there will be a sec­ond sea­son.