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The Gilded Age, Downton Abbey’s worthy heir

You move to a new, more fashionable and elegant neighborhood. You want to make a good impression on the neighbors and also invite them to a housewarming housewarming party.

Here, take this rather ordinary situation and take it back in time at least 150 years to New York, a period called The Gilded Age and borrowed for the name of the TV series that arrives on Sky and Now on March 21st. Starting from these premises, in the story add the abysmal differences between social classes, between the children of the founding fathers of United Statesthe first aristocrats of the time, and the enrichedthose who get their hands dirty in the social climb.

These two worlds collide and it is not even enough to import the best European architect and build a villa-museum to impress the gotha of the Big Apple, the very small group of those that matter.

Anyone who thought that the lower and upper floors of living on distant galaxies must change their minds Downton Abbey (by the way, the second film hits theaters on April 20). Other than communicating vessels: yes, they all lived under the same roof of the stately home in the English countryside and there servitude crosses their own lives with those of the gods mastersbut always touching them with gloves.

With this new serial gem, the Oscar winner Julian Fellowesformer author of Downton Abbey in fact, try to represent distances of even greater and even more surreal proportions. To think that even here we are metaphorically scrambling to determine who has more right than others to a seat in the front row makes the modern spectator smile, but the offspring of thenineteenth century.

Convinced supporter of the status quo And Agnes (an immense Christine Baranski Of The Good Fight), widow high-ranking, strict and traditionalist, with a reckless son, Oscar (Blake Ritsonseen in DaVinci’s Demons). The hardened bachelor with a thousand secrets would just like to find a silent and obedient heiress, who turns a blind eye to her habits and lets him lead a comfortable life. The woman lives with her unmarried sister, Ada (Cynthia Nixonthe Miranda of Sex and the City), mild and generous in character. It is she who becomes tender when the daughter of the brother with whom she has broken off all relations shows up at the door without a dowry or prospects of any kind. The girl, Marionis played by one of the daughters of Meryl Streephere at the debut, Louisa Jacobson Gummer (for the series: good blood does not lie). Due to a series of accidental circumstances, the young woman runs into a black girl of the same age, Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), and hosts her with her aunts. What should have been a parenthesis, however, turns out to be a coexistence because Agnes notices her writing skills (she dreams of becoming a writer) and hires her as Secretary.

To disturb Agnes’s domestic quiet, already upset by Marion’s arrival, is the new family on the other side of the road: the railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector), a relentless and vengeful deity of modern economics, the son Larry (Harry Richardson) and his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), obsessive social climber.

The collision is in style Titanic, in a riot of brilliant dialogues, between three-dimensional characters and breathtaking settings. The care of details is sublime as one would expect from a work by Julian Fellowes who, although far from the places and traditions that are familiar to him, manages to weave a plot captivating.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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