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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of HBO’s The Gilded Age, which returns for its second season. As with all first reviews, this is free to all subscribers, but Donna Bowman’s future reviews (and all of our episodic coverage) is exclusive to paid subscribers. For more info on what $5 a month gets you, check out our About Page.

Welcome back to 1880’s New York City! Just in case you’ve forgotten the true purpose of this show, we begin season two with a glorious montage of extravagant hats being removed from hatboxes. Color! Style! Maids assisting rich women getting dressed! That’s exactly why we tuned in, and director Michael Engler delivers with panache. Then Julian Fellowes skews the perspective just a bit, showing the characters regarding themselves in the mirror (what do they see?), and that’s also why we tune in. All these visible-yet-invisible people, so important, so on public view, and yet mysteries to themselves and each other.

I’ll just position myself right now as a Julian Fellowes enjoyer. Even though I can’t say his name without doing a Tracy Morgan impression, I emphatically do not mock or deride the man’s work. (I even listened to that Audible original series Belgravia he did a few years ago—good stuff!) The chief pleasure of a Julian Fellowes production is their immersion in the manners and styles of a class-bound society, that Upstairs Downstairs dichotomy of those who have servants, the servants they have, and those who exist precariously in both or neither realms. And the signature Fellowes touch is his interest in historical crisis, in how these traditions bend and break and remake themselves under the pressure of accelerating change.

That means that the real sizzle of The Gilded Age comes from Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell, the cherrybomb thrown into the garden party at East 61st Street and Fifth Avenue. But before we get to the fireworks, let’s catch up to where this premiere begins. Bertha and George Russell are ascendent—Bertha from her successful debutante ball for daughter Gladys, attended by the Astors and all their old-money friends, and George from escaping legal consequences for one of his trains derailing. Marian Brook nurses a broken heart, having been thrown over by her suitor Tom in favor of an heiress. Peggy Scott has gone to Philadelphia in search of her son, who did not die at birth as her father told her, but was adopted by another family. Oscar van Rhijn is conducting a half-hearted secret courtship of Gladys Russell and a wholehearted secret affair with his gay lover John Adams (yes, relation). 

Two features of this season premiere stand out as especially thrilling. First is the opening setpiece depicting Easter morning in Manhattan, with whole households arriving at church in their newest and finest clothes—crosscut with the Philadelphia Easter service attended by the Scotts. In New York, the servants mingle and gossip, and Jack Treacher chats up one of the Russell maids (to the dismay of Bridget, who seems to regret turning him down). The new rector (Robert Sean Leonard!) lets slip that Tom and the heiress are about to be married (to the dismay of recently jilted Marian). And in Philadelphia, after the pastor gracefully acknowledges Peggy’s complicated motherhood, the family that adopted her son Samuel and then lost him to scarlet fever insists Peggy take his teddy bear and photograph home.

That’s matched at the end of the episode with Bertha’s opening salvo in the great New York opera wars, a dinner party with all the families of the Four Hundred who don’t have a box in the Academy of Music—and Mrs. Astor, the person who has kept them cooling their heels on the waitlist. A booster of the upstart rival Metropolitan Opera enthusiastically lists the luminaries who will perform in its inaugural season, including the great Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson. To the humiliation of Mrs. Astor, Bertha has had her grand staircase transformed into an operatic stage, complete with orchestra and scenery, for Nilsson to give the astounded guests a sneak preview of her Marguerite from Gounod’s Faust. These extravagant moments, in spectacle and size, bookend the episode and make a statement about the scale on which this season will play out.

But of course, much of the family melodrama plays out in drawing rooms and awkward exchanges. A new character enters: Dashiell Montgomery, Agnes’ widowed nephew, recently returned to New York with his 14-year-old daughter. Aurora Fane gives an early dinner to introduce him (on the same day as Bertha’s opera affair, much to the latter’s annoyance), but also to provide cover for Oscar—resolved to go straight (as far as society is concerned) after a violent liaison at a gay bar—to propose to Gladys Russell. Agnes and Ada are shocked when Dashiell’s daughter Frances recognizes Marian, and Marian is forced to confess her secret: “I teach watercolors at St. Mary’s on Thursdays.” (“The day is immaterial!” Agnes retorts.) Later, at the Russell dinner, Watson (Michael Cerveris) is temporarily elevated to underbutler in charge of wine service, leading to a dreadful moment when dinner guest Flora McNeil suddenly recognizes him as her father. And in a literal smoke-filled room, George makes common cause with the other robber barons against the emboldened labor movement. As Jay Gould points out, if you give in to one worker demand, they’ll soon want medical care, safety measures, housing, an eight-hour work day …! 

Let me just mention my one ongoing problem with The Gilded Age. No, it’s not the name-dropping or expository dialogue or inconsistent acting quality. I consider all of those things features, not bugs. Well, maybe not the last item, but I will assert that it doesn’t bother me. This is the Julian Fellowes experience. If you vibe with him, the style becomes positively charming. If you don’t, then it’s hard to understand how anyone can overlook these flaws. I get it! But obviously you should count me in the vibing camp, and this first installment on the season showcases that style in spades. My only problem is with the color grading, which flattens all the skin tones and gives a strange brown wash to many scenes. It doesn’t come across as antiquing or sepia; the tone isn’t warm or nostalgic. Instead, detail and lighting are shallower, and we lose the sense of richness or sumptuousness that the costuming and set decoration are striving for. I don’t quite understand it; at its worst moments, it makes the show look cheap. Is it a digital artifact? Shouldn’t we be beyond that at this stage in the technology?

That quibble having been aired, I couldn’t be happier with this premiere. The opera battle is well and truly joined, Oscar’s desperate capitulation to heterosexual convention promises plenty of melodrama, and Peggy’s coming back to the van Rhijn household sadder but wiser. Intrigue, snubs, machinations, and the best costuming on television await. It’s going to be a great couple of months.

• Gladys gets to put her hair up, now that she has had her debut, thank God.

• Weirdest dress of the week belongs to Carrie Astor at the Easter service: bright blue bodice with two vertical red stripes. She’s giving “circus.”

• Ward Montgomery (and Nathan Lane’s outrageous Southern accent) is back, being squired around the enormous mansion Bertha bought in Newport and has had son Larry (the aspiring architect) renovate. Larry’s about to be introduced to a local widow who is looking to do some work on her house.

• We get to spend a lot of time with Peggy, her repentant father Arthur, and her mother—who remains snappish and dismissive of her husband, telling Peggy she doesn’t recognize the man who once saved her from white men who threatened her in the street.

• Bridget comes into Oscar’s room with coffee just as visiting John Adams kisses Oscar’s hand. Oscar rightly worries about what she might have seen.

• As much as I love Agnes, I might love Cynthia Nixon’s Ada even more. Poor Ada is left explaining to Bannister, after Agnes raises her voice in an argument over Marian’s job, that it’s sometimes good to shout a little and let off steam.

• “I love and admire you more than any other woman,” Oscar says to Gladys in a textbook example of telling the barest possible truth.

• Wouldn’t it be great if Donna Murphy were in every episode this season? Introduced to the chief promoter of the Metropolitan, she cuttingly replies that she knows him well: “Mr. Gilbert is in charge of grubbing up cash for the new opera house.”

• Pretty sure that’s a Steiff bear that Peggy takes away from little Sammy’s bedroom. Quite the heirloom.

• “Why didn’t they build more boxes when there was time?”

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