‘The Gilded Age’ Provided TV’s Simplest, Smoothest-Brained Pleasures, Lifted by Carrie Coon
21.03.2022 - 21:15
/ variety.com
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticMonday night brings the end of what has been one of 2022’s most indulgent pleasures — and one that calls to mind the TV of a decade prior. HBO’s “The Gilded Age” has made a strong argument for the efficacy of series creator Julian Fellowes’ method as a deliverer of narrative delight.Every episode has been an hourlong fantasia in which the mind, unbothered by a plot that seems at best ornamental, is free to roam — a pleasant, happy state of what Gen Z might call “smooth-brained” experience, untroubled and uncomplicated by the firing of synapses or the development of nuance.
The series is about the struggle to rise in a sclerotic, class-obsessed society, with Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector playing arriviste society newbies whose ambition is only matched by their devotion to one another. We root for them to succeed, both because their frank self-belief is more of our own time than of their own and because their continued emergence will deploy more of Coon’s big, bold, endlessly watchable performance.
The opponents to Coon and Spector’s Bertha and George Russell are, in large part, paper tigers. It’s a classic Fellowes trick to establish that his characters face opposition, and then to have that opposition be easily rolled over, bringing near-instant gratification.
And Bertha’s occasional real degradation — the moments when she faces a social obstacle she cannot fix — bring out new tones in Coon’s wild performance. A recent scene in which she was escorted out of a Newport mansion through the back door so as to go undetected by the matron of the house played like a horror film, with Coon, enduring the torment of humiliation, as its scream queen.There’s much else going on in “The Gilded Age” —
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