Sure, Downton Abbey shamelessly romanticized and whitewashed the horrendously unjust, hereditary class hierarchy of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in England. But at least the show had a lot of charm, good acting and writing... and addressed the fact that the forces that would demolish once and for all those last, dying remnants of feudalism -- the social order typified by D Abbey and it's extended world -- was arguably just as bad: World War I, with its unspeakable and senseless brutality, and, along with it, the co-emergence of the merciless destructive juggernaut of modern capitalism. No period of change could be more ambiguous in its lack of anything to really root for; it was the death of one, terrible old social order and the birth and triumph of a monster system that was even more terrifying in its capacity for violence and dehumanization. So even though 90% of Downton was a love story to a fairly tale version of medieval patriarchal hierarchy, it was at least possible to sift below the surface-level romance to find some elements of the tragedy at the heart of this bleak period in which there was real beauty to be lost and nothing really good that could come as a result of all the upheaval the show depicts.
The Gilded Age, on the other hand, offers us no such subtly and absolutely zero sense of the tragedy of this period of relentless, revolutionary, change that destabilized the entire social and economic order of the industrializing western world. Instead, it presents itself as a sweet, innocent paean to those great, unsung American heroes... the plucky, self-made made men (yes, the mf'ing ROBBER BARRONS!) who, poor guys and gals, could just never catch a break from NYC's crusty, snobby, bitter, envious old money... those cranky, stuffy, lazy, wanna-be 'aristocrats' who were trying in vain, by hook or by crook, to hold onto their diminishing turf in a world being devoured by the massive unregulated monopolistic trusts that faced no serous, organized opposition -- either from public officials or from the labor class that they so ruthlessly exploited to build their empires. Pity those industrious Russels, with whom we are undeniably supposed to identify, cruelly turned away from countless social occasions, spoken to with terrible snideness about their guache customs, and even denied attendance to the symphony in proper box seating. Oh, the humanity! However did those poor souls persevere through all that indignity?
Have we ever really stopped to acknowledge, the show wants us to ask, our nation's profound debt of gratitude to the likes of saintly figures like JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, or the Russels for their immense contributions to culture, growth, egalitarianism -- and even our world renowned institutions of charity?
Oh, boy....
As ludicrous as that premise sounds, and despite the show's occasional nods to the utter amorality, corruption, and rapacious greed of the new-money moguls, the bottom line is that that that's *really* the basic frame of the narrative: the 'nouveau riche', as the robber barons are delicately referred to, are somehow proposed as the heroes of our story! They're actually presented as the unjustly treated forces of *progress* we're supposed to rooting for in this self-aggrandizing, revisionist soap opera piece of trash of a show.
Yeah, the writing is crap, the characters are stilted, boring and two-dimensional, and the plot lines are cingingly soap-opera level drek. Alas, that's unfortunately what you get with most dramas on TV, including (tragically, IMO, given the glorious golden-age history of unparalleled works of TV art like the Sopranos), on 'premium' cable like HBO. But what makes this show so offensively bad is its basic moral/historical premise: that some of the most virulently sociopathic monsters in the history of the country are the characters we're supposed to like and root for in their quest for "acceptance" by the old-guard NYC elite.
The terrible quality of all the basic elements of quality TV in the Gilded Age are no big surprise, sadly enough. But excuse me while I puke and cry through my grimacing laughter at the very audacity the most core concept of the show itself.
The Gilded Age, on the other hand, offers us no such subtly and absolutely zero sense of the tragedy of this period of relentless, revolutionary, change that destabilized the entire social and economic order of the industrializing western world. Instead, it presents itself as a sweet, innocent paean to those great, unsung American heroes... the plucky, self-made made men (yes, the mf'ing ROBBER BARRONS!) who, poor guys and gals, could just never catch a break from NYC's crusty, snobby, bitter, envious old money... those cranky, stuffy, lazy, wanna-be 'aristocrats' who were trying in vain, by hook or by crook, to hold onto their diminishing turf in a world being devoured by the massive unregulated monopolistic trusts that faced no serous, organized opposition -- either from public officials or from the labor class that they so ruthlessly exploited to build their empires. Pity those industrious Russels, with whom we are undeniably supposed to identify, cruelly turned away from countless social occasions, spoken to with terrible snideness about their guache customs, and even denied attendance to the symphony in proper box seating. Oh, the humanity! However did those poor souls persevere through all that indignity?
Have we ever really stopped to acknowledge, the show wants us to ask, our nation's profound debt of gratitude to the likes of saintly figures like JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, or the Russels for their immense contributions to culture, growth, egalitarianism -- and even our world renowned institutions of charity?
Oh, boy....
As ludicrous as that premise sounds, and despite the show's occasional nods to the utter amorality, corruption, and rapacious greed of the new-money moguls, the bottom line is that that that's *really* the basic frame of the narrative: the 'nouveau riche', as the robber barons are delicately referred to, are somehow proposed as the heroes of our story! They're actually presented as the unjustly treated forces of *progress* we're supposed to rooting for in this self-aggrandizing, revisionist soap opera piece of trash of a show.
Yeah, the writing is crap, the characters are stilted, boring and two-dimensional, and the plot lines are cingingly soap-opera level drek. Alas, that's unfortunately what you get with most dramas on TV, including (tragically, IMO, given the glorious golden-age history of unparalleled works of TV art like the Sopranos), on 'premium' cable like HBO. But what makes this show so offensively bad is its basic moral/historical premise: that some of the most virulently sociopathic monsters in the history of the country are the characters we're supposed to like and root for in their quest for "acceptance" by the old-guard NYC elite.
The terrible quality of all the basic elements of quality TV in the Gilded Age are no big surprise, sadly enough. But excuse me while I puke and cry through my grimacing laughter at the very audacity the most core concept of the show itself.