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‘The Gilded Age’ Finds Its Balance in the Best Season Yet: TV Review
Season 3 of the HBO drama, created by Julian Fellowes, finds a balance between frivolous and substantive for its best season yet.
Creator Julian Fellowes otherwise eschewed the grand, tragic sweep of Wharton’s best-known work: the downfall of Lily Bart in “House of Mirth,” or the thwarted love of Newland Archer and Countess Olenska in “The Age of Innocence.” Instead, the show’s minimal upheaval tends to amount to a slightly rearranged status quo. Between seasons, son Larry (Harry Richardson) has taken up with Agnes and Ada’s niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson), while daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) is now infatuated with a peer despite the best efforts of her mother Bertha (Carrie Coon) to set her up with the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb). Compared to “Downton Abbey,” “The Gilded Age” has been less of an upstairs-downstairs binary than “upstairs with a passing glance down the dumbwaiter shaft.” While the paternalism toward the household staff may be dismaying, it also produces such featherweight diversions as the Russells’ team taking it upon themselves to investigate a leak to the tabloids.
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