After the “old money vs. new money” skirmishes of the first two seasons, the latest season of HBO’s costume drama finds the new money firmly in charge of New York high society. That new money is represented by George and Bertha Russell (Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon), a self-made business tycoon and his ambitious wife determined to rise to the top of New York’s elite at any cost. Unfortunately, their newfound prominence means that the old money most directly represented by spinster sisters played by Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon are once again left with very little screen time or purpose.
Buy The Gilded Age: The Complete Third SeasonCreated by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes, the series attempts to transplant Downton’s Upstairs/Downstairs update across the pond to the New World. Even though the season episode counts are comparable to Downton, The Gilded Age continues to have too much going on to fit in an eight-episode season. In addition to the criminally underutilized Baranski and Nixon, other notable players barely appear, including Broadway greats Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, and Kelli O’Hara, seemingly only materializing on set during dark days on Broadway. O’Hara fares the worst, appearing for seconds in all but one episode of the series so far and still making zero plot impact. And yet they keep adding more characters, with Phylicia Rashad the most notable of numerous new faces this season.
With too many characters and plotlines, the “downstairs” contingent of servants are entirely one-dimensional characters with no chance to develop, aside from one young buck who stumbles into a massive fortune thanks to his hobby invention, moving him upstairs for good. Other than him, the Russells are fully in charge, with George risking financial ruin to build a transcontinental railroad and Bertha finagling a marriage to the Duke of Buckingham for her unwilling daughter, quickly adding even more prestige to the family. Many, many other subplots are on order, including flashes of social commentary on women’s suffrage and colorism, but the spotlight is now firmly on the Russells as the alpha storyline.
Unlike Bridgerton’s similar romantic entanglements of the idle rich, romance is kept completely superficial here, with relationships more topics of discussion than passionate affairs. Additionally, the costumes are more than equal to Bridgerton’s eye-popping creations, but they’re all so fresh and impractical that the actors never appear at ease in their roles. The clothes are visually stunning, but I couldn’t help wishing they just beat them up a bit first to add some believability and lived-in comfort for the actors.
The DVD set includes two bonus features: “The Black Elite of New York” and “Designing a Ball.” Sound is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, but the lack of Blu-ray or 4K release is really inexcusable for a current show with such impressive visual production design. Fingers crossed for a Blu-ray box set whenever the series completes its run.
After three seasons, I still can’t really say I like the series. It’s visually stunning and stuffed with fantastic performers, but plot deficient and devoid of meaningful character development. Coon is clearly now the sole star, as telegraphed by the DVD cover art, and she continues to be a delight to watch as the conniving social climber, but the show would benefit greatly from either much fewer characters or many more episodes per season.
