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.
