The Gilded Age may have glittered during its first two seasons on HBO, but the period drama really turned solid gold — both in terms of dramatic impact and viewership — in Season 3. And no one was more surprised and delighted about that upgrade than the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes.
“I think it did catch fire last season,” the Emmy- and Oscar-winning scribe behind Downton Abbey and Gosford Park happily tells Gold Derby from his U.K. home. “I’m not sure whether the show found itself or the audience found the show.
“The fact is, it takes time to get interested in these characters,” Fellowes continues. “With an American series, it used to be that people would judge the first season very harshly and cancel it after only half the episodes. Whereas the English have been a little bit better about understanding that this is a process that takes awhile. For that to work, you need a very good cast — and we were lucky in that regard.”
That luck paid off in eight Emmy nominations for Season 3 — the biggest haul in the show’s history — including nods for Best Drama Series, Best Drama Actress for Carrie Coon, and Best Drama Guest Actress for Merritt Wever. The Gilded Age‘s slow rise through the Emmy ranks is the inverse of what happened with Downton Abbey, which exploded out of the gate with 11 nominations for the first series, and kept raking in nods during the rest of its run. Although Fellowes reveals that his earlier hit was also met with some skepticism on both sides of the pond just before it premiered.
“There had been this misapprehension that period dramas were dead, and there was no audience for them anymore,” he recalls. “But what they quickly realized was that they weren’t dead — it’s just that there weren’t any airing; at least any that were made in the right way.”
And for Fellowes, “the right way” to make a series about the lives of the British and American upper crust — as well as the working classes that work for them — in the 19th and early 20th centuries means putting all the characters on equal footing, whether they live upstairs or downstairs. “My generation of television makers were aware that on Upstairs Downstairs, the wealthy family was gracious and the servants were funny,” the writer says, referring to the hit 1970s period drama that defined the genre for decades. “That’s all right as far as it goes, but it denied the servants a kind of real life.
“Then we got into a period in the 1990s where the wealthy families on those shows were shown as being horrible, greedy, and brutal, and the servants were all victims,” Fellowes continues. “But my philosophy has always been that most people are just trying to give their lives as best they can. They don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘It’s so unjust that I was born working class.’ They just think, ‘Christ, I’m late for the bus!’ And similarly, you can have a terrible start in life even if you have all the advantages of being wealthy. As a dramatist, you try to get some mileage out of those differences.”
Fellowes’ philosophy is most keenly felt in one ofThe Gilded Age‘s most popular Season 3 storylines. During the course of the eight episodes, lowly footman Jack Trotter (Ben Ahlers) partners with train magnate heir Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) to sell his then-cutting-edge invention: an alarm clock. After an extended negotiation, the duo receives the whopping sum of $600,000 — $300,000 apiece — in exchange for the patent to Jack’s device.
While another show might have wrapped up the storyline with Jack being swindled out of his good fortune, The Gilded Age leaves him as the head of his own household who hasn’t forgotten the people he’s left behind. (Of course, we’ll have to wait and see if he’s still smart about his money in Season 4.)
“I wanted that storyline to mark the differences between Europe and America,” Fellowes explains. “In Europe at that time, wealthy people were all descended from gentry families, and when they weren’t, they made them up! But the generation of Americans to gain wealth after the Civil War were less anxious to imitate Europe; they saw a new way of doing things. They still wanted society and successful people, but they made this new country have an economy that was the best in the world.”
Of course, as Fellowes acknowledges, the individuals who made, rather than inherited, the Gilded Age economy — think John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie — weren’t exactly scrupulous in their business dealings. “Rockefeller bankrupted his rivals more than any other human being,” he points out. “The morality of a different age is always difficult to understand. Nevertheless, I think they were an exciting generation; that period represented a burgeoning economy with all of these opportunities, and where Europe was stuffed with all of these old philosophies, Americans were free to fly. There’s something about that I admire — although I don’t admire it unreservedly.”
One of the perils of flying high is the danger of crashing back down to Earth. And that happens to The Gilded Age‘s resident robber baron, Morgan Spector’s George Russell, aka “Train Daddy,” after he’s nearly killed by an assassin presumably dispatched by a rival. That shooting provided the cliffhanger finale to the penultimate episode and set the table for a tense finale where George narrowly escapes death — although his marriage to Coon’s Bertha may be six feet under.
“When you write television, there are times when you have to produce a spectacle of some sort,” Fellowes says with a grin about George’s near-miss with death. “You’ve got to make everyone jump or cry, so it worked on that level. But it also spoke to something that intrigues me about the Gilded Age — the mixture of the Wild West and wealthy society that co-existed at the same time. That lent an element of danger and violence to the time that’s interesting to me.
“And George and Bertha are a classic case of the difference of perception between marriage in American and Europe at that time,” Fellowes continues. “Yes, they love each other and they’re attracted to each other, but subconsciously, they’re looking for someone who can share the burden of what they plan to do. It’s more of a business operation, whereas Americans had — and still do — a more romantic view of marriage. These are two ambitious people who saw each other’s ambition, and now they’re out of step. When you’re out of step, you’ve got to get back in step.”
Look for those two crazy kids to patch things up in the upcoming fourth season. And if you’re a Broadway nerd, stay tuned for plenty more appearances from some of your favorite stage stars. A glance through the Playbill for any Tony-contending production proves that The Gilded Age has replaced Law & Order as a top TV destination for Broadway actors in between their time treading the boards, from Kelli O’Hara and Phylicia Rashad to Brian Stokes Mitchell and Nathan Lane. Fellowes says that grew out of the show’s origins during the COVID pandemic.
“Broadway was dark when we were making the first season, and all of these actors were sitting around watching afternoon television,” he says now. “One of our directors, Michael Engler, said, ‘Why don’t we cast some of them?’ So some of them came onboard and then, of course, many more of them came onboard. I hope they’ve benefitted from it, and I know that we’ve certainly benefitted from it.”
