'The Gilded Age' Season 3 Mid-Season Trailer Takes Us to England

The Gilded Age crossed its mid-point of Season 3 with a triumphant staging of Gladys' wedding to the Duke of Buckingham. Much like The Buccaneers did before it, Gladys' wedding is inspired by (and pulls from) one of the most famous Gilded Age weddings of all time: Consuelo Vanderbilt to the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Their nuptials became the poster child of wealthy new-money American families marrying their daughters off to old-money titled British families who had run out of old money. The Marlborough marriage was a disaster, ending in divorce at a time when that was not the done thing. It also destroyed her parents' marriage in the process.

Series creator Julian Fellowes has always been obsessed with the marriage of moneyed Americans to the British aristocracy. Downton Abbey's origin story of the Lord and Lady Grantham is that Robert Crawley was a young fortune hunter, and Cora Levinson's parents all too happily sold her up the river along with a tiny fortune to be able to say they were the parents of a Duchess. In Downton (which is more fairy tale than The Gilded Age), Robert and Cora discover they are pretty compatible, in bed and out of it, and by the time we meet them two decades on, they are happily married with three girls.

The Gilded Age is not being so kind here. Gladys' arrival at her new palatial estate comes immediately after the wedding. Because she fought the marriage so hard, she has no idea if she and the Duke of Buckingham can get along out of bed, let alone in it. The series will finally dig into the piece of the story Fellowes wanted to tell in the first place when The Gilded Age was first dreamed up in 2012: What the world was like for those like Cora and Robert when the wedding was over, and they had to figure out how to communicate when they come from two countries separated by a common language.