Family fortunes

Julian Fellowes brings wealthy New York high society to life in a star-studded period drama

- CAREN CLARK, ALISON SLADE

NEW DRAMA

The Gilded Age Tuesday, Sky Atlantic HD, 9pm

Writer Julian Fellowes is best-known for shining a spotlight on the lives and loves of the British aristocracy and their servants in the early 20th century in Downton Abbey. Now, in his new series, The Gilded Age, he turns his attention to the compelling romances, schemes and ambitions of the upper echelons of New York society and their staff in the 1880s.

The period was a time of huge economic change as the wealthy elite who came from ‘old money’ were faced with middle-class rivals profiting from growing industries.

‘I was always interested in the Gilded Age, that period after the American Civil War when enormous fortunes made from railway, shipping, copper and coal were flooding into New York,’ explains Fellowes. ‘But it was the Gilded Age, not the Golden Age. It was all about the look of things, creating the right image. So you had great rivalries between the new families and the old.’

That class warfare is at the heart of the drama, which follows penniless but strong-minded orphan Marian Brook (newcomer Louisa Jacobson, the daughter of Meryl Streep) as she moves to New York to live with her estranged aunts, Ada and Agnes, after her father’s death.

CHANGING TIMES

Although spinster Ada (Cynthia Nixon) is caring, her no-nonsense older sibling Agnes (Christine Baranski) holds the purse strings and despises the nouveau riche who she sees as a threat to the upper classes.