The Gilded Age has returned for its fourth season on HBO. A period drama set in New York City in the 1880s, the show is as good as ever. The plots are pulpy, the performances are fantastic, and the visuals are spectacularly opulent.

It’s also hard to watch The Gilded Age without feeling at least a little guilty.

The Gilded Age is a high-end soap opera epic

You’ve never seen glitz and glamour like this

The first season of The Gilded Age introduces us to Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobson), a young woman who comes to live with her aunts in New York City after the death of her father. Her aunts happen to be old-money aristocrats living in an opulent house on East 61st Street. Marion is our introduction into the world of high society. She has romantic escapades, supports the growing cause of women’s suffrage, and starts up a relationship with Larry Russell (Harry Richardson), the son of the new-money family next door.

Larry’s parents are Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George Russell (Morgan Spector), who made their money in the railroad industry. George is an old-fashioned robber baron who dominates his industry by manipulating stocks, using vertical integration to control supply chains, and forcing his employees to work long, punishing hours for little money.

There are plenty of other side characters and subplots, but the main conflicts in The Gilded Age revolve around the battle between “old money” and “new money,” those with generational wealth vs the new crop of millionaire industrialists. For instance, in Season 2, there’s a storyline about Bertha Russell trying to secure a private box at the Academy of Music. After she’s rejected by the old-money types on the board, she plots with other new-money families to build the Metropolitan Opera House, which becomes the opera house of choice for the ultra-rich.

That subplot is based on the real-life 1883 “opera war,” and is good fun. But the show is sometimes at an awkward impasse with actual history.

Robber baron as sympathetic heroes

Kajillionaires are just like you and me

Simply put, The Gilded Age has a habit of sanitizing some of the most brutal aspects of history at a time when it seems especially tone-deaf to do that. In particular, its insistence on making the robber-baron Russell family the heroes of the story can read, at minimum, as weird.

I’ll give you some examples. In the second season, George Russell has to deal with striking workers at his steel mill in Pittsburgh. The workers want an eight-hour workweek, something we now consider standard, but which was unthinkable at the time. George’s underling proposes to send in armed guards to break the strike, but George instead decides to personally visit union leader and talk things out. He ultimately decides on resolving things through negotiation rather than violence.

This is very nice of George, but it couldn’t be more different from what happened during the Homestead Strike of 1892, which seems to be what The Gilded Age storyline is based on. In that strike, workers fought agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in a battle that left nearly 10 people dead. Troops were sent to Homestead, the union was crushed, and robber-baron Andrew Carnigie decided to cut wages, eliminate jobs, and demand 12-hour workdays.

Another example comes from the first season, when there’s a fatal train derailment on one of George Russell’s railway lines. George investigates and figures out that the derailment happened because a couple of unscrupulous employees purchased sub-par parts and then tried to cover their tracks by claiming that George had ordered them to cut corners. George is cleared of any wrongdoing.

In reality, things were complicated. One of the multiple real-life robber-barons to inspire the character of George Russell is Jay Gould, who was known for taking control of rail lines and then gutting their budgets. That earned them a reputation for being unsafe and prone to accidents. But in The Gilded Age, the show wants us to know that George Russell is never at fault for anything that goes wrong, and only has the best interests of his employees at heart.

Like past, like present

Is there a George Russell of the 21st century?

So The Gilded Age makes the robber-barons of the late 1880s look a lot cuddlier and less problematic than they really are. Instead of grappling with their well-documented legacy of exploitation and worker abuse, the show turns the robber-barons into underdogs fighting against new-money snobs.

This feels like a particularly odd framing considering that we’re currently living in an age where the ultra-rich are more powerful, and potentially more dangerous, than ever before. Between Meta laying people off by the thousands, Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to government programs, and Anthropic researchers predicting AI could kill us all, the billionaire set hasn’t exactly been endearing itself to the masses lately. And yet here’s The Gilded Age, insisting that the super-rich are looking out for the rest of us.

The Gilded Age is problematic. Who cares?

So that’s the “guilty” part of “The Gilded Age is a guilty pleasure.” But what about the “pleasure” part? Well, taken on its own, The Gilded Age is a very good TV show. George Russell may be a ridiculously dishonest interpretation of a robber-baron, but he’s a likable character. The drama is generally very low-stakes, which means it’s an easy show to just pick up and start watching.

There’s an easy, relaxing quality to The Gilded Age that feels very similar to a show like Downton Abbey, which was created by the same guy, Julian Fellowes. That show also fudged plenty of facts about history, but it was still a massive hit. There’s something innately appealing about a show where beautiful people wear beautiful outfits and talk in beautiful rooms. You don’t have to think too hard about it, you just enjoy it.

If you’re a fan of The Gilded Age, you don’t need to stop watching; I certainly don’t intend to. But you can enjoy the show while staying mindful of the fact that you’re basically watching a fantasy.

Release Date

January 24, 2022

Network

HBO Max

Showrunner

Julian Fellowes

Directors

Deborah Kampmeier, Salli Richardson-Whitfield

Writers

Julian Fellowes

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