The Gilded Age Has Perfected the Art of Trivial Drama

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The Gilded Age has a fraught relationship with one of the required features of dramatic storytelling: that plot should happen and occasionally have real consequences for its characters. The Gilded Age would generally prefer that nothing disrupt the basic contours of its serene status quo, where ladies in hats sit in drawing rooms and deliver smiling rebukes of one another’s decor. But like any series reliant on keeping everything basically the same, it has struggled to keep the story going while also ensuring that nothing much happens. Awkward relationships have to be dispatched with abrupt carriage accidents. Past experiences that should be truly disturbing, like a stolen baby or tragic death, are detailed and then swiftly swept under the nearest Aubusson rug.

Four seasons into its run, The Gilded Age has finally arrived at the fullest expression of its ideal form. It has cleared out the too-heavy political machinery and dialed back on most characters who can’t react to a social faux pas with the appropriate amount of horror. They’ve been replaced with more parties and nights at the theater and opportunities for significantly waggled eyebrows over selecting a menu. This is a topsy-turvy, sitcom-esque world. Everything that should be significant in a story, like horrible medical outcomes or financial ruin, ultimately leads to very little. Anything that seems relatively unimportant, like who sits on what dais, becomes the calamity of the century. It is ridiculous and it is beautiful.

Season four opens with the pieces set where the show left them at the end of season three. Bertha and George Russell remain at odds, as George recovers from being shot by a malcontent and continues to unfairly blame Bertha for everything that’s gone wrong in his perpetual quest to become the most powerful man in New York. Ada Brook and Agnes Van Rhijn are living on the earnings from Ada’s deceased husband’s estate, meaning that sunny younger sister Ada still has the upper hand over stentorian traditionalist Agnes. Agnes’s gay son, Oscar, has decided to marry wealthy widow and former lady’s maid Enid, whose social ambitions will benefit from the prestige gloss of Oscar’s last name. Peggy Scott, on the precipice of becoming a famous author, is now engaged to Newport’s most eligible bachelor, Dr. Kirkland. Agnes and Ada’s niece, Marian, who remains central to The Gilded Age’s storytelling despite never once being interesting enough to justify the attention, is still inexplicably fighting her mutual attraction to the Russells’ son, Larry. The Inventor Formerly Known As Clock Twink does his best to make it in high society.

Various things happen to most of these characters throughout season four, which is a description with exactly the vague hand-waving about significant events that The Gilded Age invites. Yes, some events do occur, which, yes, cause many of these characters to feel a variety of feelings against a colorful array of settings. But based on total screen time, pacing throughout the season, and amount of energy devoted, the season-four arc most worth mentioning is that President Grover Cleveland will, at some point, be coming to dinner.

The Gilded Age is a television show built on dinners and letters. Any new plot device typically arrives in the form of a written document, often a letter but possibly a newspaper article or someone’s will. Occasionally, when it simply cannot be avoided, characters might say important things out loud to one another, but that generally happens off-screen so that any excessive displays of emotion or dramatic tension need not mar the show’s beautiful placidity. When there must be some interlude of friction or a character needs to be brought low, The Gilded Age’s preferred mechanism is a dinner, ideally a fancy one with a complicated guest list and a variety of logistical obstacles. Hosting a dinner for the president is the apogee of The Gilded Age’s ambitions. Letters can be sent about the dinner, invitations must go out, newspaper articles about the event will be written and then read. The arc consumes so much time and attention for the central characters that it allows the show to wear the mantle of seriousness without having to behave like a serious drama. He is the president of the United States, after all. But the dinner does not need to accomplish any one thing in particular. It’s not a life-or-death event. No one will starve. It’s just that this dinner must go well! It must!

Grover Cleveland is not the only arc here, though it seems to be the one the show cares about the most. The richest story in season four deals with Peggy and Dr. Kirkland, who find themselves at odds about how to navigate their unusually modern future together, not just as Black people in a world that barely accepts their existence but as a couple pursuing individual career aims. Their mothers frequently butt heads, and Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald continue to show up to The Gilded Age’s paper-thin character development with enough performance muscle to make Mrs. Kirkland and Mrs. Scott remarkably human. The Russells, meanwhile, are still grappling with John Rockefeller, who continues to outmaneuver George’s increasingly desperate business strategizing. After season two’s swift late-in-life marriage and season three’s chipper experimentation with the temperance movement, Ada once again finds herself an interest that will likely infuriate her family. And there’s Marian, ever in search of an appropriate husband yet perpetually turning people down for reasons that make zero pragmatic or even emotional sense.

Season four is the most enjoyable The Gilded Age has ever been, but wringing every ounce of pleasure out of the experience requires a willingness to approach this show with the right mind-set. Watching with the hope that anything serious will ever shift for the central characters is a fool’s errand. Assuming that any newly introduced character or story will inevitably feature in the season finale is similarly misguided. The Gilded Age is beyond simplistic writing truisms like making every scene matter or following a story line all the way to a resolution. No, the only way to truly appreciate The Gilded Age is to adopt the same perspective that Oscar and Enid prefer when gazing upon the rest of New York society. It is an overdramatic and ultimately trivial enterprise where all the big things are nonsense and all the tiny things are all-consuming, and it is best experienced when accompanied by many, many cocktails.

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