‘The Gilded Age’ Season 4 Brings a Premiere Full of Change

One of the best things about The Gilded Age is its self-awareness. A gorgeously decadent costume drama set among the high-society elites of late-nineteenth-century New York, it’s one of the few real success stories of the streaming era. The show has not only steadily increased its audience from season to season, but has also evolved into the best version of itself along the way. It’s a much-needed reminder that even the most appealing shows can take a minute to find their feet, and that the patience invested in allowing them to do so can pay off handsomely.

(Translation: Give shows more than a single season to cook!)

As The Gilded Age enters its fourth season, it’s rarely felt more confident in its own identity, and its hard-won sense of self is more than earned. It knows precisely what we want and delights in giving it to us, often in the most unexpected ways possible. (Except for a reconciliation between the Russells, who are very clearly and purposefully being kept on opposite sides of an ocean. Sigh.)

Still, this premiere has plenty to recommend it, from its slightly darker, more mature tone to its absolutely bonkers plot twists (though most pull their punches before too much tragedy strikes). It also sets the table for a season full of action-packed society drama.

Picking up a few months after the Season 3 finale, “Ring the Bells” throws us right in the deep end from its opening scenes. As screams resound throughout the stately English manor where the new Duchess of Buckingham, Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga), and her needed-to-import-American-cash husband reside, it’s clear we are deep into 1880s childbirth territory and all the risks that it involves.

In fact, for a good long while, The Gilded Age makes it seem like poor, sweet Gladys is for sure a goner. Her baby is breech; the doctor’s worried enough to force her husband to decide whether saving the life of his wife or his heir should be prioritized, and even after she (miraculously) manages to survive labor, she starts hemorrhaging in a way that implies creator Julian Fellowes might be pulling another Sybil Crawley. But (even more miraculously), Gladys somehow lives, only for the doctor to announce that he had to perform a hysterectomy to save her life, and she won’t be having any more children.

(Neither her husband nor her mother have found the moral courage to break that news to her yet. Always next week, I guess!)

On some level, it feels fair to wonder whether killing Gladys off here might have been the move. Sure, the character is sweet, and Farmiga is a much more capable actress than the material she’s often given reflects. But this show’s cast is already wildly unwieldy, and Gladys’s position in England makes it impossible for her to be part of the main canvas the same way she was before her marriage. But, at the end of the day, The Gilded Age is a soap opera, not a tragedy, so we’ll all have to soldier on together.

Even with Bertha across the pond at her daughter’s bedside, there’s still plenty of drama in Manhattan, including a splashy society wedding! The Gilded Age cheekily tries to make its audience believe that it’s Larry (Harry Richardson) and Marian (Louisa Jacobson) tying the knot, but we all know there’s no way we’re getting out of their will they/won’t they drama so easily. Nope, it’s Oscar van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) and Enid Winterton (Kelley Curran)!

Though their actual ceremony is not nearly as boundary-pushing and/or tacky as some of us (read: me) might have been expecting/hoped, their union represents everything that makes this show great: A lavender marriage between a gay heir who needs the respectability of a wife and a wealthy former ladies’ maid who scammed her way into fortune by marrying a rich old man. They’re made for each other, as shown when they immediately, iconically get drunk at their reception, head to a dancehall, and party all night.

(They also have grand plans for rewriting the rules of high society with their boundary-pushing je ne sais quoi, but we’ll see how that goes.)

Agnes’ palpable relief that at least her son married a woman is short-lived, however, when she learns that said woman used to do Bertha Russell’s hair across the street. But she gets over it pretty quickly when she realizes her new daughter-in-law has the cash to help fund the big Heritage Society dinner she’s hosting that will include President Grover Cleveland as a guest. Maybe these two will be friends after all.

Elsewhere, despite having ostensibly gotten back together at the end of last season, it appears that Larry and Marian have somehow broken up again, because this show is just convinced that its viewers care a lot more about the Van Rhijns’ niece than they actually do and are just dying for this story to drag out even longer. Anyway, after chatting for the first time in months at Oscar’s wedding reception, Larry, with an assist from the new bride and groom, convinces Marian to join them all for an afterparty downtown.

Marian, despite making her dislike of establishments like downtown dance halls and brothels her entire personality toward the end of last season — Larry’s presence at one was the reason they broke up the first time! — says yes. Predictably, she not only has a great time, but the still-existing connection between her and Larry is obvious.

Sloshed, she accepts a carriage ride home from him, but in true The Gilded Age fashion, a lightning storm spooks the horses and crashes the carriage, forcing the pair to take refuge in a nearby hotel for the night. Where, despite getting two different rooms (what a missed opportunity to deploy “there’s only one bed trope!”), they still end up hooking up. Marian Brooks, designated goody-two-shoes, has had premarital sex with a man she’s not even dating anymore, let alone engaged to. This is the greatest show on television.

Marian handles her first one-night stand as predictably as you would expect, immediately throwing on clothes and speed-walking/running-of-shame her way out of their hotel while insisting she is ruined forevermore, leaving Larry speechless (and possibly crying?) in her wake. To be fair, her concerns are not ill-founded! She is a woman in the nineteenth century and is held to much higher standards than the men in her orbit, including the one she just slept with. (One who has been to a brothel before.)

But that’s a story for the rest of the season, it seems.

The Gilded Age Season 4 continues with weekly episodes on HBO and HBO Max on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET through the end of the year.

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