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The new saga from the creator of “Downton Abbey” looks at the class war between old and new rich in New York at the end of the 19th century, with a gallery of characters less hollow than usual despite a delicious duo of actresses.
“First the electricity, now the telephone…Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an HG Wells novel.” The little spade of the brilliant Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey never ceases to ring in our ears in front of the new television series from its creator, Julian Fellowes – somewhere the term “TV series” seems inadequate as his sagas are destined to stretch endlessly, to spread in a multitude of archetypal characters who take flesh in the microscopic, a reply, a gesture, a way of spying on the other which translates a way of standing at a very precise and codified point of the social chessboard. All the tensions, in The Gilded Age, seem to be tied around a future in the making and a present clinging to the past. After having scrutinized the life of great British houses during the 1930s (Gosford Park by Robert Altman, whose screenplay he signed) and the immediate pre-war (Downton Abbey), Fellowes, 72, pushes the lever of his time machine a little further and this time is interested in New York during the Belle Epoque. A project in development for years and for which HBO and NBC waged a bidding war, the private group finally snatching the rights to the network in 2019.
rococo palace
Before unfolding in all its complexity and magnitude around…