‘The Gilded Age’ Serves Up Ambition and Shame With Season 4 Return

[This story contains spoilers from The Gilded Age season four premiere.]

The Gilded Age is officially back. And while that world is still turning, it’s not quite moving in the way many fans had predicted.

After a third season filled with dramatic deaths and near-deaths — not to mention an arranged marriage motivated by power and position later punished with an unexpected sacrifice of the heart and an exciting wedding proposal — season four’s first episode “Ring the Bells,” directed by executive producer Salli Richardson-Whitfield, immediately kicks off with another seesaw of emotions.

In England, Gladys — as many women, even the wealthy ones, of that era did — experiences the life-threatening birth of her first child with the loving Duke she was forced to marry, and now adores, by her side, while Oscar van Rhijn trades “I do’s” with his bride (yes, bride!) Enid Winterton, the new Mrs. Oscar van Rhijn.

Gilded Age creator, executive producer and writer Julian Fellowes tells The Hollywood Reporter that the first episode featured the van Rhijn wedding because “we wanted to have the fun of catching everyone out so that at the beginning they think that they’re going to be watching one of the weddings they’ve been expecting, and this is one of them they haven’t been expecting.”

Element of surprise aside, Fellowes adds that “it’s nice to have a group scene to start a series off. You want to show a lot of your characters and the world they’re operating in so that your public can become reacquainted with the whole setup. If you start a series with a two-hander of two people sitting in a sitting room talking, it doesn’t quite do the same thing. You’re saying to the viewer, ‘You’re back in our world, and here we all are.’”

This season, the show feels even more personal. “We wanted to test all of the relationships within the show. So marriages, romances, familial relationships. I think the social mobility that is inherent to America is also something that’s tested, and we get to see who gets to move up socially, where they get to go,” says Fellowes’ The Gilded Age collaborator Sonja Warfield, who serves as executive producer and writer alongside Fellowes.

Newly rich Jack, who still feels a servant at heart, demonstrates some of those social growing pains. “When he enters into society with all of these, to him, sort of fruitless and sometimes aimless rules around how to behave and how to operate with power, he’s having to decide for himself how much he wants to play in that space, especially with how much he’s already sacrificed to be here,” Ben Ahlers explained during The Gilded Age press conference at New York City’s iconic The Plaza Hotel.

“The negotiation that I think all of these characters really, in the end, have to make, is: what are they willing to sacrifice for what they feel is right for them?” he added.

George Russell, with his self-imposed estrangement from Bertha, a storyline that carries directly over from last season’s finale, seems to be renegotiating his position to both wealth and family when most feel, like Carrie Coon who embodies Bertha, that “George needs to get his act together.”

“We’d set up in the previous season that this extremely well-balanced and well-suited marriage was beginning to hit a rather rocky period, which I think is no more than real life. In films, everyone’s happy ever after — but nobody’s happy ever after in life. We wanted to go on with that and explore it, and see the extent to which they could come together again or not,” says Fellowes.

The first episode hints that George is clearly not himself. With another business crisis on hand, he’s even barking at their son Larry (Harry Richardson). Investigators may have also found George’s would-be assassin.

“It’s a total life reset for George,” is how Morgan Spector explained his character dynamic during the press conference at The Plaza Hotel. “His relationship with Bertha, has, if not collapsed, at least fallen on hard times. He’s been nearly killed and he also failed his daughter [Gladys] catastrophically.

“For George,” he continued, “the relationships with Gladys and Bertha — not so much with Larry — are central to his concept of himself as a good human being. He’s really failed in both of these areas, and his capacity to compartmentalize and be business-ruthless, but loving father at home, is all out the window. Now he’s got to figure out how he can think of himself as a decent person and what his principles really are going forward. That’s all at play in this season.”

After nearly losing Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), and sparring with Lady Sarah (Hattie Morahan), the duke’s sister, over why a mother would choose her child over the male heir if only one could be saved during childbirth, Bertha is at least pleased that Hector (Ben Lamb), the duke, if it came down to it, chose to save his wife over his child, his heir.

“Gladys is doing great, and Bertha feels vindicated about that,” he says.

Had Gladys been able to choose between herself and the baby, Farmiga, who is not a mother herself, tells THR, that since “there’s such a high mortality rate for infants at that time, it’s expected that something is probably going to go wrong. And I think at that point she would probably choose herself for the first one, at least.”

While Bertha has secured Gladys’ future and place in society, Enid, her former lady’s maid who made a play for George, is still on a journey to lock hers down. “Social mobility and so on and so forth are all represented in the wedding of Oscar and Enid where they are marrying for many reasons, but none of them have to do with romantic love. And you know that was a reminder that we’re back in this very worldly group,” says Fellowes.

“She just wants power,” Kelly Curran said of Enid. “And society is her runway to achieve that. Just as Oscar doesn’t have to hide his homosexuality from her, she doesn’t have to hide her ambition.

“She sort of ascends each season,” Curran explained. “Now, she has the full support of the van Rhijn family name and this partner who’s really her best friend. It’s an incredible trajectory. So not only can she feel that kind of security and support for the first time in her life, but now she can do something with it. She has a vision and she has taste and she plans.”

“They are very unified in their vision of a new society,” Blake Ritson chimed in of Enid and Oscar’s pairing. “Even though they come from very different backgrounds, they’re kind of kindred spirits. They like being disruptors, effectively.”

Their union also brings hope to Oscar’s mother Agnes van Rhijn, played by the fantastic Christine Baranski. Fresh off the wedding, she’s downright giddy about hosting a dinner for Grover Cleveland, the President of the United States, as vice-president of the New York Historical Society in the home she shares with her sister Ada Forte. After grieving her husband’s death last season, Ada is finding a new sense of confidence which includes saying no to funding Agnes’s presidential dinner. That leaves an opening for Enid. While news of her daughter-in-law’s servant past doesn’t thrill Agnes, Enid’s ability to finance her dinner does.

Cynthia Nixon, who plays Ada, loves Agnes’s new attitude. “One of the delightful and hilarious things that we get to see this season is unhinged Agnes,” she shared.

“The ambitions of the Gilded Age were worldly ones,” Fellowes reminds us. “This was not a particularly spiritual society. And they weren’t wrestling as we are where everyone’s always trying to look nowadays like the most generous, charitable person on earth. And you ask any film star what they care about and they go ‘well, what I care about is the destruction of the environment.’ Really, what they care about is what their agent has managed to get with the size of their trailer, but they don’t want to say that, and so they create this illusion.

“Well, similarly, in The Gilded Age, what everyone wanted to look like was the most successful person on earth. And a lot of the palaces they built, the clothes they wore, the things they did, were all designed to frame and exaggerate their success. I suppose we remind people [of that],” says Fellowes, who also created Downton Abbey. “After all, it is The Gilded Age; it’s not The Golden Age. And “gilded” means there is an element of falseness that you’re trying to make something look better than it is, and that’s exactly what they were trying to do.”

Peggy’s journey is not false, but rarified for any woman, especially for a Black woman of the time. Everything seems to be going Peggy’s way — personally and professionally. As she prepares for her wedding to Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), her once contentious soon-to-be mother-in-law Mrs. Kirkland (Phylicia Rashad) has become quite agreeable, even helping to plan the wedding, buying the wedding dress, and inviting her and her mother Dorothy Scott (Audra McDonald), whom she sparred with just last season, to join her “ladies club.”

Not only has Peggy’s book Friends in These Times been published, publisher Ada and good friend Marian, she later beams to Agnes, is “talking about a lecture tour.” And her fiancé William, she brags when Ada asks, “is right behind me, urging me on at every step.”

Peggy just couldn’t be happier. “She’s sort of undeniable in her Renaissance Woman era, which is exciting,” Denée Benton observed of her character this season.

Judging by the first episode, Marian doesn’t fare too well this season. Caught off guard by all the fun she had at her cousin Oscar’s naughty after-party for his and Enid’s wedding at the very type of “establishment of ill-repute” she ended her engagement to Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) for attending last season, Marian, or Ms. Brook rather, stumbles greatly. Caught in a storm that results in Larry’s carriage being grounded, Marian finds herself in a hotel with Larry. Although they both have their own rooms, Larry knocks on her door and sweet talks his way in. Intoxicated by the air of freedom, Marian makes the one mistake her aunts Ada and Agnes had warned her against since the first day she showed up on their doorstep. And, once the sun comes up, the weight of losing her sexual purity fully hits her hard.

By today’s standards and customs, especially since she and Larry are clearly in love, Marian’s horror may seem overblown. But Louisa Jacobson in later conversation with THR alongside her co-stars Denée Benton, Harry Richardson and Ben Ahlers reaffirms just how serious the situation truly is.

“Marian is the person who reminds us of the way that things were then,” she says. “We have to remember what time period we’re living in — this is the 19^th century! Having premarital sex was the biggest cardinal sin.”

That decision, she further explains, could absolutely cost Marian everything. “There’s an external obstacle,” Jacobson says “If people were to find out what happened in episode one between the two of them, she would be put out on the streets; she would be destitute; she would lose marriage prospects; her life would be completely ruined. And that is real.

“And that is really hard to understand as a 2026 audience with all the freedoms that we have, and bodily autonomy that we hopefully still have,” she continues. “I think it’s more about there’s an external obstacle there, and there’s the internal obstacle of shame that has been baked in and really internalized due to decades and decades of women learning like these sort of Victorian purity and moral ideals that women were held to. So I think it becomes less about Larry and love, and more about how to navigate those waters and those obstacles.”

As time stamped as Marian’s situation appears, The Gilded Age’s appeal lies in its ability to resonate with today’s sensibilities. That Fellowes says has more to do with human nature. “At the basis of any drama series, you have to remember that human beings don’t change much. And so things that were worrying people in 1500 are probably still with us. You know nobody’s got enough money, and did they marry the right person, and why did their children do what they’re told anymore? You can find all of that in Socrates. And you know it’s still with us. I always hesitate to claim a message. You know, Sam Goldman, if you want to send a message, go to Western Union, and I slightly agree with that. But I do think that it’s good for people to realize that what they’re going through is not unique to them, or because they’re unusually cursed, or whatever it is. But in fact, it’s just part of being alive, and I think that in that way you can make a period drama feel modern because so much of what they’re going through is modern,” Fellowes says.

Warfield agrees: “Period dramas are both timely and timeless because they deal with the fragility of you know the human experience. Of course, ours happens to be set in the Gilded Age, and we’re living through another Gilded Age, so history rhymes.”

And those miss-if-you-blink cameos by David Letterman and Matt Damon don’t hurt either.

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New episodes of The Gilded Age drop every Sunday at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on HBO until Dec. 20.