Just three weeks after the new period drama The Guilded Age launched on HBOMax, the network has renewed Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes’ late 19th century New York-set drama.
The nine-episode series (which spent nearly a decade in development at NBC) had HBO’s best Monday night debut since the limited series Chernobyl and has been a big hit for HBOMax.
In history, the Gilded Age was a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in the U.S. during the 1870s that gave rise to important novels of social and political criticism. It was a period of immense economic change, of great conflict between the old ways and brand new systems, and of huge fortunes made and lost.
HBO’s The Gilded Age begins in 1882 with young Marian Brook moving from rural Pennsylvania to New York City after the death of her father to live with her thoroughly old-money aunts, Agnes van Rhijn and Ada Brook. Accompanied by Peggy Scott, an aspiring writer seeking a fresh start, Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between one of her aunts, a scion of the old-money set, and her stupendously rich neighbors, a ruthless railroad tycoon and his ambitious wife, George and Bertha Russell.
The series stars Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Louisa Jacobson, Denée Benton, Taissa Farmiga, Blake Ritson, Simon Jones, Harry Richardson, Thomas Cocquerel and Jack Gilpin, with Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski.
Seeing as how Downton Abbey is one of the greatest TV shows ever made, anything from Julian Fellowes is going to be worth checking out, and it would seem audiences are already hooked on Gilded Age. Will you be checking it out? Let us know in the comments!
