“The Gilded Age” has always been influenced by the work of Edith Wharton. Both the novelist’s oeuvre and the HBO drama are set among the upper echelons of New York society in the late 19th century, documenting frictions both large (the rise of a new industrial elite) and small (imperceptible breaches of etiquette).
But in its first two seasons, “The Gilded Age” heaped all its stakes onto a handful of storylines, most of them anchored by the series’ few characters of color. 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. In Season 2, the blue-blooded Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) lost her fortune and fell into financial ruin — only for the household’s wealth to be quickly restored, just put in the hands of Agnes’s kind-hearted sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon).
This pleasant, gentle balance is finally disrupted for the better in Season 3, which recalibrates “The Gilded Age” into a show that’s more dramatic in some areas and more lighthearted in others than it’s been in the past. Through her dashing new love interest, Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), budding journalist Peggy (Denée Benton) gets to experience a social world of her own: the Black elite of Newport, Rhode Island. This milieu is both true to history and solves one of the series’ longstanding structural flaws. Shut out of most elite spaces by racism, Peggy had previously been confined to the story’s margins and saddled with some of its weightiest elements, like a reporting trip to the South that brought her face-to-face with the reality of a nascent Jim Crow regime. Now, she gets the luxury of problems like a priggish potential mother-in-law played by Phylicia Rashad.
This conflict isn’t devoid of larger resonance, like Rashad’s Mrs. Kirkland looking down on Peggy’s father Arthur (John Douglas Thompson) for having been enslaved before the Civil War. (She’d prefer Peggy came from a family with more “history,” as if ancestry were a perk of freedom.) It just also allows Peggy to engage in affairs of the heart, not just the issues of the day. To fill the void, the newly widowed and therefore flush Ada casts about for a cause to invest in, much to Agnes’s horror. She dabbles in temperance before settling on women’s suffrage. Neither effort would bear fruit at a national level for a few decades to come, but Fellowes and his co-writer Sonja Warfield convincingly weave them into Ada’s mourning period alongside goofier elements like the psychic Madame Dashkova (national treasure Andrea Martin).
On the other side of 61st Street, the nouveau riche Russell family becomes a case study in that classic Whartonian theme: the complicated web of love, money and status. 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). The trajectories of these two relationships highlights how much factors into an era-appropriate marriage besides attraction, and injects “The Gilded Age” with the intensity of youthful attachment. Gladys’ involvement with the Duke both gives the previously underused Farmiga a spotlight and returns the show to its roots, as Fellowes was initially inspired by the American “dollar princesses” who married into European aristocracy — like Cora Grantham of “Downton Abbey” or Wharton’s own “The Buccaneers,” themselves the subject of an Apple TV+ show.
In a show otherwise marked by steadfast monogamy and occasional affairs, the monumental feeling of a first major relationship is a breath of fresh air. Less uplifting, though equally seismic, is the fate of ensemble mainstay Aurora Fane (Kelli O’Hara), whose husband abruptly demands a divorce. Through no fault of her own, Aurora is saddled with a stigma that paints her social circle in an unusually harsh light by “The Gilded Age” standards. Fellowes and Warfield are typically more enamored of their setting than liable to critique it, but Aurora’s treatment underscores the harsh costs of a rigid hierarchy.
Make no mistake: this is still “The Gilded Age,” and those in search of eye candy or unchallenging distraction will continue to find it in spades. The hats alone would put a Kentucky Derby crowd to shame, and the appearance of figures like J.P. Morgan (Bill Camp) offers the simple pleasure of recognition. 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.
Speaking of the Russells, Season 2 hinted at tensions between Bertha and her robber baron husband George (Morgan Spector). These seeds bear fruit in Season 3, both over the question of whether Gladys should marry for love and George’s stress over his efforts to build a transcontinental railroad. As much as “The Gilded Age” is ostensibly about social change, it’s also generally loath to rock the boat — and imperiling a story element as bedrock to the show as the Russell marriage, let alone building actual suspense around the outcome, is a major step forward. “The Gilded Age” no longer feels torn between ogling the past and honoring its flaws. Three seasons in, it’s on firmer footing than ever.
Season 3 of “The Gilded Age” will premiere on HBO and Max on June 22 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
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