'We're Running Out of Mansions'

How The Gilded Age makes absurdly low-stakes period drama into must-watch television.

- By Jackson McHenry

ON A GRAY soundstage in Maspeth on a Friday evening in October, Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski are working out how to play what, for the HBO period drama The Gilded Age, amounts to an astonishing shift in power between siblings. Baranski’s Agnes van Rhijn has usually been the dictator of their prominent family. But at the end of last season, her ne’er-do-well son, Oscar (Blake Ritson), lost her fortune in a scam, while Nixon's do-gooder, Ada, received a surprise windfall, inheriting money from a now-dead husband, played by Robert Sean Leonard. “Before the season filmed, we had great fun imagining what she would do with the house,” Nixon tells me. “Would she turn the elegant brick home into a soup kitchen?”

As it turns out, her character has taken on various charitable causes, including temperance. In the scene they're filming, Ada has decided to try to get her servants to sign a pledge to give up drinking, much to Agnes’ dismay. Baranski repeats a joke about a Brit's loyalty to “the queen and the bottle, not necessarily in that order,” to herself like she’s a pianist rehearsing an étude. Meanwhile, the crew—including one PA wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with photos of Baranski in the style of a metal band—coos over the dog on hand to play Ada’s beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniel. (Asked what it's like to work with the dog, Baranski channels Agnes and answers, “No comment.”)

These are the typical stakes of a