Anyone who is annoyed about the property prices in German metropolitan areas today should better avoid this series. Because in the New York of the HBO series The Gilded Age Is it still possible for higher earners to build a house near Fifth Avenue, in an area of Manhattan that shortly afterwards and to this day was unaffordably expensive, into which the city was growing north at the time. If you want to get rich through real estate, you should have started in New York in the 19th century.
It’s all about economic growth, money, and above all social standing The Gilded Age, an American version of the history series Downton Abbey. She was created by Downton Abbey– Inventor Julian Fellowes, who is a member of the British House of Lords as Baron Fellowes of West Stafford. In Manhattan in 1882, Fellowes does not take on the British nobility, their country houses and domestic servants, but the New York moneyed nobility, their city palaces and their domestic servants. The protagonist is the young Marian Brook (Meryl Streep’s daughter Louisa Jacobson), who moves from rural Pennsylvania to her wealthy aunts (one of them Cynthia Nixon) and needs to be introduced to better society.
To the dismay of the guardians of the elite circle – which prides itself on belonging to the old and therefore better New York – newcomers are spreading there at the same time. Nouveau riche are taking over Manhattan, namely railroad magnate George Russell (Morgan Spector), who and his wife have built a newfangled palace on 61st Street and Fifth Avenue. New money collides with old, and social reservations escalate into a social struggle in which more is at stake than just a good reputation. Right in the middle is the inexperienced Marian, who often has to wonder about the snootiness of these people and the rigid rules in their world.
Marian is not allowed to go out on the street alone by her aunts out of concern for the family reputation. She is therefore often accompanied and advised by her confidante Peggy Scott. She moves in as a secretary with Marian’s aunts, but actually wants to be the first black woman writer in the USA. As well as Downton Abbey seeks The Gilded Age for dramas on every floor and nook of a mansion, in the ballrooms and parlors of the owners, and in the kitchens and closets of the employees.
And although Julian Fellowes’ narrative principle through Downton Abbey is so successful and tried and tested, and the cast in The Gilded Age just as convincing as the hat creations on the heads of the New York ladies, the series seems too tried. The dramatic music doesn’t keep up with the plot, Manhattan’s Victorian streets look like computer graphics, in short: the whole story lacks soul. The old rich in The Gilded Age boast that their ancestors were already on the Mayflower crossed over to the New World. But some things are better left on the old continent.
The Gilded Age, nine episodes, Sky.
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