First impressions of The Gilded Age

In another timeline, where I never discovered Once Upon A Time and didn't lean as hard into my geeky side, I would probably be in love with George Russell by now. He's easily the most compelling character in the Julian Fellowes-scripted The Gilded Age which is now streaming on HBO Max (only one episode per week, annoyingly). From what I've heard, the first season will be ten episodes long, and there's a second season on the way. Which is good news, because this series is – promising.

"Promising" was my first reaction to the pilot episode. I loved episode two, was less taken with the strained plotting in episode three, but then got properly into it all again in episode four. My main criticism is that, maybe, the series should have moved beyond "promising" by now. True, Mr Russell is great. His main function in the story may be that he's the ruthless railway tycoon and representative of "new money", but he's more than just a hard-nosed businessman. With the exception of being implausibly hard on some hapless aldermen in episode three, when it would have served his own interests better to be more lenient sooner, he's sensible and shows good judgment. He objects to his wife treating their grown daughter Gladys as a child, and rightly suspects the high-born Oscar Van Rhijn of pursuing Gladys only because of her fortune. He isn't too touchy as far as his own social status is concerned; when a member of the old New York society confesses in an embarrassed way that his peers "can be snobbish", Russell replies stoically "perhaps they're right to be". His warfare with the old New Yorkers has more to do with them snubbing his wife Bertha than him, plus with their ill-advised attempt to get the better of him in a business deal. Last but not least, he's been an exemplary husband so far, supporting Bertha's social ambitions and rejecting the advances of her scheming lady's maid ("the flaw in your argument is that I love my wife").

But what of the other characters? The antithesis of Mr Russell, set up to be the equivalent of the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, is the heroine Marian Brook's aunt Agnes Van Rhijn, who is unfailingly caustic about the "new money" crowd, not least the Russells. But that is mostly her function so far – to be the snobbish dragon whose cynicism nevertheless proves to be well-founded at times. "My Aunt Ada is kind but not clever, my Aunt Agnes is clever but not kind" Marian sums up in the trailer (we haven't seen her say it during the show yet), and that's about it. In fact, Aunt Ada is proving to be the more complex of the aunts this far, as she isn't quite as clueless as her niece and sister think. Bertha Russell has a little more going for her – I like that she is just as unfailingly supportive of her husband as he is of her – but mostly she too is defined by one characteristic, her social ambition. Other characters, like most of the downstairs staff in the Russell and Van Rhijn households, hardly have a personality at all so far. However, Simon "Bridey" Jones plays the Van Rhijns' butler Bannister with enjoyable gravitas, and Kristine Nielsen's Mrs Bauer skips over the first irascible stage of costume-drama cooks and goes directly for the motherliness of Mrs Patmore in later Downton series. There are things to build on here.

One would do well to remember that Downton too took its time to get going in the characterisation department. There, many of the characters had sharp edges who had to be partly filed off in later series. In series one, Mary and Edith were at each other's throats in potentially life-wrecking ways, Mrs Patmore bullied Daisy, Thomas was mean to William for no reason that even I can see (though I get why he didn't care for the needling Mr Bates) and straight up stole, not only wine bottles from the cellar but money out of Mr Carson's pocketbook (this detail I still have difficulty believing). The only one who stayed as sharp in later series as when she was first introduced was Miss O'Brien, and even she was given some softening traits with time. When I reread my thoughts on the first series, I can see that I was well entertained but not completely blown away (though rewatching series one has made me more fond of it).

The Gilded Age's problem, if it has one, is the opposite. Too many of the characters at this stage are just a little too nice. This can definitely be said about Marian, a girl of "good" family who's left penniless by her irresponsible father on his death and is forced to seek a home with her estranged aunts. Marian is unfailingly optimistic and thinks the best of everyone. In some cases, she's probably in for a disappointment, but in others she is surely the one in the right and not her Aunt Agnes. It is a little perverse of me, after having complained that Mary in Downton was too bitchy, to now claim that The Gilded Age's heroine is too much of a goody-two-shoes. Even so, there's a blandness to the character which I hope will be righted in time. What's more, Marian's friend Peggy Scott, a self-sufficient young woman with writerly aspirations who helped her out on her train journey to New York, is also a good girl, so any sharp-tongued bitchiness has to come from the older generation. The latest episode introduced some well-needed tension in the relationship between the girls. Peggy is black and faces all kinds of drawbacks because of it, something Marian seems partly unaware of. At the same time, Marian has made some condescending assumptions about Peggy's circumstances which place her in a very awkward position and ruffle Peggy's feathers. I've no doubt the girls will make up, and I want them to, but the little spat between them did this part of the story some good.

But what is the story? This is another potential problem for the series. Downton had many different storylines going on, but there was a basic throughline. At first, it could be seen as "the heir's tale" – we were to see how the middle-class Matthew Crawley would adapt to being Downton's heir, and how the castle's family would adapt to him. When Dan Stevens bailed, the focus had to shift more to the survival of the estate itself, but you could argue that this was part of the main story all along. The series is called Downton Abbey after all. Up until now, though, we haven't had a clear, main plotline in The Gilded Age. Whose story is it telling? Is it about the "old money" Van Rhijns/Brooks and the "new money" Russells and their relationship to each other? But the two families haven't interacted a lot so far, because of Agnes keeping her distance. Marian and Larry Russell, who I assume will be her proper love interest (Aunt Agnes is probably right about the unsuitability of Mr Raikes) have only met two or three times. In the series synopsis, there's talk of Marian being tasked with "infiltrating" the Russells. The sooner they can start that plot unfolding, the better.

Is Doctor Who: Flux Chibnall's best series, or a complete mess, or both?

I was really grateful when Doctor Who series 13, also called Flux, arrived in the post last week. I needed cheering up, and this series managed to do it. Consequently, I'm inclined to be positive. This is, in my view, the best Doctor Who series with Chris Chibnall as show runner and Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor – in spite of the fact that the Master didn't show up, as I had expected he would. It was gripping, the villains were (most of the time) intriguing, the good guys were easy to root for, and though the high-concept geeky stuff didn't always pay off, it kept Chibnall from producing lacklustre episodes with simplistic political messaging (though he was close once – I'll get back to that). There simply wasn't time for that kind of nonsense when there were alien baddies everywhere and the odds were sky-high.

At the same time, Doctor Who: Flux is flawed. I was a bit worried in the first episode when a lot of different storylines started off at once, and though most of it made sense by the end, there were a number of loose threads and plot holes left. There's no denying the series (which was planned to be longer but had to cut down on episodes because of covid) was over-stuffed. In a way, Chibnall bit off more than he could chew, but I enjoyed seeing him try to get the giant morsel down.

It's easy to expect a show runner to get better and better as time goes by, but it's not always as simple as that. An author or script-writer tends to have certain strengths and weaknesses that are more or less constant. Chibnall will never be the new Moffat. Moffat's high-concept ideas often had holes in them too, but he carried it off (mostly) with brilliant writing. Chibnall's writing isn't terrible (except when he gets political), but it doesn't have the same wow factor as Moffat's. This means, when an explanation for strange goings-on  is not forthcoming, I'm less inclined to be forgiving (having said that, I still haven't forgiven Moffat for not explaining how Gallifrey made it back into our universe and for the hybrid cop-out).

So what are the strengths and weaknesses of this series, which are echoed in the Chibnall era overall?

Strength: good villain handling Chibnall's new villains in series eleven were infamously weak, but he tends to handle recurring Who villains like the Master and the Daleks well. This time around, we get new villains I really enjoyed in the form of the Ravagers (a different name would have been better, seeing as the Ninth Doctor fought another alien threat with the exact same name in a Big Finish adventure, but that's a quibble). It's a pity they are tied up with the Doctor's Timeless Child past and involved in some complicated "Space versus Time" conflict that makes no sense, but I very much liked their style. The male, Swarm, is delightfully cutting and superior, and his sister Azure gets a kick out of destruction and genuinely can't understand why the Doctor feels so differently. They are powerful and intelligent, just as villains should be. It has been remarked on that their wildly different punishments for past crimes are never explained, but it allows both of them to enter the plot in an effective manner (ah, the high-security prisoner who's more in control than he should be – a classic). 

As for recurring villains, the Sontarans, who were mostly played for laughs during the Moffat era, were reintroduced as a serious threat – they really are very good at making war. The grand plan they have at the end of the series is actually excellent. Props to Chibs for coming up with that one. The Weeping Angels, too, were well handled, though their inclusion felt a little unnecessary.

Weakness: Scoring simple points We didn't get too much of that in this series, as previously mentioned, but there was the second episode "War of the Sontarans". The Sontarans were fine, but the characterisation of the humans was less impressive. We are at the time of the Crimean War. The Doctor and her gang meet Mary Seacole, the British-Jamaican nurse and owner of the "British hotel", and a clueless-seeming General.

You can guess exactly what happens next. Naturally, Mary Seacole does everything right, and the Doctor is constantly delighted with her. Not once do they clash. The all-English, white, male General on the other hand messes everything up, leading to a massacre of his men, has to ask the women for help, and then on top of everything else blows up the Sontaran ships when – gasp – they are retreating. (One of these days, someone should tell the Doctor that attacking a retreating enemy can actually be a sound military strategy, especially when it's Sontarans who never really give up. War is not a cricket match.) Characters who are only there to make a point are mostly badly written, and the General is a case in point. Mary Seacole would have been more interesting, too, if she hadn't always been such a paragon and the Doctor's best bud, but at least Sara Powell gives a spirited performance as the newly popular nurse.

Strength: likeable companions Yes, compared to the companion greats during the Russell T Davies era the Thirteenth Doctor's crew are sketchily drawn, but they're nice sketches. Yasmin aka Yaz, who has been there since the beginning of the Thirteenth Doctor's time, is the most developed as this point. She is something of a mix between Clara and Martha – wanting to be the Doctor and (I think) secretly smitten with the Doctor too – but it works and can be touching. Mandip Gill is given more to do here than in previous series and gives it her all. New companion Dan is more of a comic-relief Graham surrogate, but he works well off Yaz. The scenes where he, Yaz and a professor of Psychology called Eustacius Jericho are stuck in the beginning of the Twentieth century and trying to get back to the present day are among my favourite ones: the trio make a very engaging team of historical adventurers. Among other Doctor allies we have Vinder, exiled from his home planet for standing up to an autocrat, and his gutsy girlfriend Bel, who is trying to get back to him after they're separated by his exile (and the universe potentially ending). Commentators have pointed out that they could be taken out of the story without much changing, and I guess that's true – but they're so sweet.

Weakness: too many plots (and inflexibility) There are plots that could be lifted out of the series wholesale, which would have left more time to answer some pertinent questions, such as did most of the universe actually end or not? I understand that covid left the story arch more cramped than it was supposed to be, but Chibnall should have considered solving the problem by ditching some characters and concepts. There is, for instance, the Grand Serpent, the dictator Vinder falls foul of, who's played with slimy aplomb by Graig Parkinson but who adds precisely nothing to the plot and is a pretty generic bad guy. The whole "Space versus Time" concept and the personification of Time at the end (I've seen it more effectively done in a Prince Valiant comic) could also have been removed. Not to mention...

Weakness: The Timeless Child debacle Chibnall managed the feat of stubbornly making sure his idea of the Timeless Child remained canon, while not making anything interesting with it. We meet Tecteun, who confirms that yes, the Doctor was the Timeless Child and worked for the Division, who are responsible for the potentially universe-ending Flux. But then Tecteun dies by the hand of the Ravagers. The Doctor gets hold of her forgotten memories from her Timeless Child days, but never accesses them, and in the end decides to store them away without taking a peek. (I have to admit, the visual representation of the Doctor's forgotten memories as an Impossible House was cool.) And we are still not given the answer to quite basic questions, such as: if the Fugitive Doctor is a Timeless Child version of the Doctor, why does she already call herself the Doctor and travel in a police-box-shaped Tardis? At this point, Chibnall holding on to the Doctor's Timeless Child past comes across as sheer contrariness. Future show runners can ignore it, but not erase it. At least, that's what he thinks.

So I know that I ended with one more weakness than strength, but I did like this series, honest. And I fully expect to see the Master in one of the specials later on.