USA’S DOWNTON ABBEY HITS TV SCREENS NEXT WEEK
SHARP-TONGUED putdowns, lavish sets and sumptuous costumes. It sounds like Downton Abbey but The Gilded Age is a new series which aims to be to the American equivalent.
Written by Downton’s Julian Fellowes it showcases the vast wealth of New York’s elite in a year of rapid American economic growth between 1870 and 1900.
The Gilded Age was an exciting time. It was the start of the American Dream as the States’ industrialisation began to make it the global superpower eclipsing Great Britain.
The upper class of Manhattan’s high society was divided between those who had established roots well before the American Revolution and those who had made their vast fortunes from investments and business after the American Civil War.
Fellowes, 72, brings the clash of old and new money together with the rivalry between two New York families – the aristocratic van Rhijn and the social climbing Russells. The writer, whose second Downton film hits cinemas in March, said: “I was always interested in the so-called ‘Gilded Age,’ that period after the Civil War in the 1870s and 1880s, when enormous fortunes made from railway, shipping, copper and coal were flooding into New York. It’s the ‘gilded age,’ not the ‘golden age.’ “It was all about the look of things, making the right appearance, creating the right image.” And he he insists his new TV series isn’t a prequel instead it’s “darker and edgier” than its British counterpart. The series, which starts next Tuesday on Sky Atlantic and NOW, begins with Marian Brook (played by Meryl Streep’s daughter Louisa Jacobson), arriving in New York after her father dies to live with her old money aunts, Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon). Accompanied by her new acquaint
ance Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), an aspiring writer, Marian becomes enmeshed in a social war between her family and rich new money neighbours, ruthless railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his ambitious wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon).
The nine-part first series was just days from starting production in March 2020 when the Covid pandemic forced a lockdown. It had to wait until September 2020 to start again and the 162-day shoot wrapped in June 2020.
Actress Carrie Coon, 40, had challenges of her own. She said: “I was eight months pregnant when the show wrapped so I was in a particularly vulnerable state, though I was vaccinated early. “Everyone took such good care of me, and it was extraordinary how well they were able to hide my pregnancy. “What they were able to do with costumes and a well timed carriage was amazing.” As well as the social clashes and seeing both upstairs and downstairs, The Gilded Age also has a strong black cast with storylines about how people whose grandparents had been slaves found a place in the new world of opportunities.
While Fellowes wrote all of Downton himself he had black voices to help with a crucial black storyline – co-writer Sonja Warfield, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, who directed four of the episodes and the series historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar.
Warfield said: “One thing we rarely see on screen is the black middle class, the black elites, of that time. I loved bringing these stories to light.
“We see stories about slavery, but we don’t know that black professionals existed, that there was an influential black press.”
The Gilded Age begins on Tuesday, Sky Atlantic at 9pm.