The Gilded Age returns November 1 and drops the richest man in America into the Russells' world
Three seasons in, the Russells have out-spent, out-schemed and out-married everyone on Fifth Avenue, and season 3 left them sleeping in different houses. HBO has now put a date on the repair job — and season 4 brings in a man with more money than both families combined.
HBO has dated The Gilded Age: season 4 starts on November 1 and runs eight episodes on HBO and Max, after an August teaser that has been read and re-read for three weeks. The show jumps two years to 1886, which in this series is enough time for a marriage to collapse and an entire social order to be rearranged around it.
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Season 3 ended with George Russell walking out of the house he built for Bertha, and with Peggy Scott accepting William Kirkland's proposal. Season 4 picks up with the Russells living apart, Agnes van Rhijn plotting a return to relevance, and a calendar full of weddings that nobody involved is entirely happy about.
That teaser leans on the part the show does best: women deciding what a reputation is worth. Bertha, facing the bill for everything she forced society to swallow, gets the line that sets the season's temperature.
"We are truly being tested. We must fight with every tool we have."
The new arrivals are not invented
This is where season 4 gets interesting on paper. Dennis Haysbert joins as John D. Rockefeller — at that point the richest man in America, and a fortune the Russells' looks modest beside. Jim Gaffigan plays President Grover Cleveland, Dallas Roberts plays his Treasury secretary Daniel Manning, and Bonnie Milligan turns up as the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, which in 1886 was the machine that decided what respectable America thought.
Julian Fellowes has always used real names as furniture — the Astors, the Vanderbilts, Clara Barton. Rockefeller is a different order of guest. A family that has spent three seasons buying its way into drawing rooms now has to sit at a table with the man who does not need one.
New money spends a decade proving it belongs. Then older, bigger money walks in and the proving starts over.
What the eight episodes are actually about
The synopsis and the teaser point at five threads, and four of them are marriages:
- George and Bertha — separated, with a reconciliation the show is in no hurry to grant.
- Agnes — stripped of position in season 3, and promising vengeance in the trailer.
- Peggy — engaged, and facing in-laws who have opinions about her family.
- Marian — on a new path after the collapse of the last one.
- The President's Dinner — the season's set-piece, and the reason Cleveland is cast at all.
Carrie Coon has said for two years that she expects the writers to follow the Vanderbilt divorce to its conclusion, and the setup for season 4 is the closest the show has come to it. November 1 is a Sunday, which is where this series has always belonged.
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