'The Gilded Age' Tries Using Its Powers For Good

By Chris Revelle | TV | December 5, 2023 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | December 5, 2023 |

The Gilded Age on Max has strengths and weaknesses. Elaborate gowns, fabulous locations, soap opera antics, employing Broadway icons, these are things the show does well. Deep characters with consistent emotional realities, plots with clear arcs you can follow, focussing on inequities of the time, not so much. That third aspect in particular is a consistent weak spot for the show. The understanding of inequity Gilded Age showed in season 1 was rudimentary. I felt some apprehension as this season continued wading into sadly still-topical issues of American oppression like racism, misogyny, and union-busting. This show is not the most equipped to take on sensitive issues; its lane has been delivering silly period soap fun and when that sensibility is applied to social justice, the potential for a disaster is high.

I’m relieved to report that it’s not a disaster (yet). There is much of the season left to go and plenty of chances for the train to jump the track. The penchant for rich people having fights about opera boxes is still firmly intact, but the narrative focus has expanded to include stories about the struggle against bigotry. These depictions seem more educational in intention than the other soapy fare. The show’s approach to these issues can occasionally feel like an info dump, but it’s a relief to see a period show that’s otherwise fixated on rich white people acknowledge and make space for stories of the marginalized. While the show could certainly go more in-depth with these topics, it’s a pleasant surprise to see it rendered respectfully.

For example, did you know the Brooklyn Bridge was built largely by a woman? Emily Roebling popped up in the most recent episode when nepo baby architect extraordinaire Larry Russell dropped by the engineering offices of Washington Roebling, the man tasked with building the bridge. Only he seems to be out of the office almost constantly. Larry senses something is up when he finds Emily at the center of the workroom giving assignments and guidance to the engineers. He eventually confronts her and she tells her story: Washington was charged with overseeing the construction before he fell ill and became bedridden. Emily acted as a go-between, collecting orders from Washington and relaying them to the staff. In time Washington taught her everything he knew and she became a wizard of an engineer, making decisions and calls on her own. This was kept secret as women achieving education of that level was not a popular notion. Was this story basically dumped on Larry for the benefit of the 2023 audience? Probably, but I’m glad they made space for it.

Then there’s George Russell and his labor dispute plotline. Russell’s workers have unionized and are demanding things like days off and livable wages. This is arguably the show’s least confident foray into social justice. George is framed by the show as a protagonist and Gilded Age is not a show where they have intentionally villainous protagonists. This points at a larger tangle I’m not sure the show knows how to undo: we’re meant to like George, but Goerge is an archetypal character meant to represent robber barons and we know as an audience that robber barons, much like corporations today, skinflinted their workforce who they viewed as expendable resources, creating the template for the continued erosion of workers’ rights.

Goerge is flustered and intrigued when a union leader refuses his attempts to buy the leader off. The scene establishes the broad positions of each side of the conflict without many theatrics. To my eye, the framing of the scene favors the union. The union leader speaks movingly about their simple desires to provide for their families and suggests that no one is meant to work all the time while George’s response is basically, “I can’t pay you more because the other robber barons wouldn’t do it.” This favor seems confirmed when we later get a scene of a union meeting that expands on the notion of workers’ rights as human rights, something that’s framed as radical for the time (the meeting is held in whispers in a dimly lit room) and still feels radical now. After a long strike that saw studios refusing to pay their people for no other reason than they didn’t want slightly less money, it feels notable to see a series on a Zazlav-owned platform give unions a positive light. Unions gave us the weekend, it’s the least we can do!

Finally, we come to Peggy and her experiences covering the opening of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Peggy had an eye-opening experience seeing life south of the Mason-Dixon Line as a Black person who knew life only in the North. Not that the North was a super equitable place for Black people, but in the South, it was much worse. Peggy sees how much fear and violence Black people live under and how tenuous the peace is. Her boss, T Thomas Fortune, clashes with Booker T. Washington over this dynamic. Fortune wants to fight for farrier treatment and equality while Washington sees the concessions to white people they made to get the school built in the first place as necessary. The struggle for liberation looks different for each marginalized group, and no marginalized group is a monolith in either their experiences or their solutions. That’s a nuanced concept I didn’t expect a show like Gilded Age to grasp. The show wisely allows each argument to be presented as valid without giving evident favor to one over the other. It’s not a world-changing treatise about race, but it presents the issues therein with more nuance and grace than I expected. The secret to this may lie in how the show included voices of color in their writers’ room. It’s a wonder what some representation behind the camera can do.