'And Just Like That'… and 'The Gilded Age' have one thing in common

We are living in a season of endings. It’s in the air, the news, the background hum of everyday life: a sense of collapse. And so it naturally follows that the two most-watched HBO shows this summer are about people doing almost anything to avoid facing the end.

At first glance, the two shows seem to have little in common. And yet, for all their differences, they are essentially the same story, dressed in different geegaws. The Gilded Age is an opulent costume drama set in 1880s New York, a fictional story populated with real historic events and figures of the era, like Caroline Astor, JP Morgan, and John Singer Sargent. And Just Like That… is a present-day romantic comedy made from the salvaged parts of its (objectively better) predecessor, Sex and the City.

On AJLT, Carrie Bradshaw has become a landlord. Newly widowed after the death of Big, she returns to single life in her 60s: older, not necessarily wiser, but now wealthy enough to buy a multimillion-dollar Gramercy Park town house and gesture vaguely at writing her first novel. Charlotte attempts to be a perfect Upper East Side mom, and Miranda explores her queerness and sobriety post-divorce.

On The Gilded Age, the naive Marian Brook searches for freedom, love, and a rich husband under the watchful eyes of her aunts, Aunt Agnes, unnerved by a society suddenly welcoming the new money she’s spent her life excluding, and Aunt Ada, left adrift (and wealthy) after the death of her husband. Across the street, the nouveau riche Bertha Russell schemes her way to social dominance, fueled by her robber-baron husband’s wealth and her own obsessive ambition.

Watch them together and you see it: women living lives covered in a shiny, gold-like patina that obscures the rot underneath. These are shows that delight in the aesthetics of wealth, but their narratives are all about distraction as survival and what it looks like when people use glamour to distract themselves from the end of a relationship, a life, a world. They are, above all, shows about escape.

 

Bertha Russell can’t bear the idea of being new money forever and focuses all her attention on trapping her only daughter in a loveless marriage to a duke. Carrie can’t bear the quiet after grief; her escape comes in the form of shoe shopping, slowly decorating her empty multimillion-dollar townhouse, writing a romance novel, and rekindling her relationship with Aidan as if starting over is the same as beginning. Their worlds are intricate machines made up of parties and travel and renovations, all so no one has to look too closely at what in fact is ending.

There are moments that seem to crystallise this avoidance into something verging on profound. Carrie, alone in her empty townhouse, surrounded by balloons. Bertha, frozen in horror as her husband tells her he won’t be there when she returns from smoothing over her latest social crisis. These are women who have arrived at the summit of every choice they’ve ever made, only to find they have everything yet nothing at all.

Once described as “the least dramatic drama on TV,” The Gilded Age has started to earn more favourable reviews and steadily rising ratings, while it’s something of a national pastime to hate-watch And Just Like That… (This tweet by author Rose Dommu sums it up nicely.) Whatever the reasons for tuning in, we watch these shows week after week. And in watching them, we look away from our own endings. We are suckers for nostalgia, and AJLT offers the vague comfort of familiarity even when its storytelling falters (like killing Lisa Todd Wexley’s father twice). The Gilded Age, meanwhile, offers the comfort of distance and time, the sense of a pending resolution for societal ills safely quarantined in an imaginary past where even corruption came with excellent manners.

We are, of course, living through our own Gilded Age, only the robber barons have been replaced by tech oligarchs. At the season 3 premiere of The Gilded Age, HBO exec Casey Bloys joked, “One of the hallmarks of an HBO show is always reflecting something in society today, and the idea that we would be in another Gilded Age is somewhat unbelievable. But I’ll take Railroad Daddy over Elon Musk.” (Railroad Daddy refers to the character George Russell, played by actor Morgan Spector, a union-busting railroad tycoon.)

At the same premiere, Christine Baranski, who plays Agnes van Rhijn, referenced the real-life industry tycoons from whom creator Julian Fellowes drew inspiration: “I mean, these robber barons, they were ruthless and corrupt and tried to manipulate the government and politics. But they were philanthropists and they created the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall. Look at these men, who had so much money. How did they use it? They really used it to the benefit of their society.”

 

Which brings to mind something Agnes says in episode five of the first season.

“Charity has two functions in our world, my dear,” she tells her niece, Marian. “The first is to raise funds for the less fortunate, which is wholly good. The second is to provide a ladder for people to climb into society who do not belong there.”

Is that wholly bad? asks Marian.

“Not wholly, perhaps,” Agnes replies, “but it should give us pause.”

Some things that give me pause: The idea of a benevolent billionaire. The fact that so much television (particularly on HBO) is about the ultrarich (The White Lotus, Succession) or those striving to join them (Industry), people frantically trying to achieve milestones like property ownership or marriage or success or social capital as markers of self-actualisation. The fact that I watch both AJLT and The Gilded Age religiously, a little bewildered, strangely invested, always conflicted.

These shows are mirrors of our own half-measures: our nostalgia binges, our aestheticised doomscrolling, our indulgence in glamour while everything burns. The dissonance, for me, is what makes them compelling. The more unreal they are, the more honest they feel about how we live now. I think that’s why I can’t stop watching The Gilded Age and AJLT. For all my eye-rolling and nitpicking, I come back every week because they give shape to my own avoidance. They provide a space where I can sit with dread and decadence at the same time. They remind me that every era has its own glossy contradictions and distractions, and within these distractions, we can see most clearly what we don’t want to face.

Go back and watch the old episodes of Sex and the City where Carrie dates a bisexual or when Samantha dates a Black guy, and you’ll learn a lot about the sexual and racial mores of the late ’90s and early 2000s, a time when feminism often meant the ability to opt into capitalism, not challenge it.

As cultural critic Maia Wyman notes in her video essay “Sex and the City: Love at the End of History”: “For all its indiscretions, SATC captured a particular zeitgeist of ’90s America, an exclusive one no doubt, but a zeitgeist that had an interesting perspective on the increasingly inauthentic, apolitical, acultural, and ahistorical white Western world.”

Together, AJLT and The Gilded Age are similarly capturing a record of America’s uneasy relationship with reality—how the look of things, now more than ever, takes precedence over the way things actually are. Decades from now, if historians are still a thing, it will say something significant about America in the 2020s that these shows existed in this way at this time: lavish capitalist fantasies of survival emerging when the foundations of American life were crumbling beneath our feet. These shows will read like dispatches from a culture that chose to aestheticise its anxieties rather than confront them. You can’t watch these shows without noticing the wispy ghosts of everything they obscure, slowly creeping into the frame. Or, you can. It’s a choice, and the choice is the point.

What we really want, of course, is more. Not necessarily more television, but more stories that speak to this current, strange, apocalyptic moment: uneasy, unglamorous, slightly broken, still worth fighting for. Escape has its place, but to seek escape is to acknowledge that there is something we are trying to escape from. We have AJLT and The Gilded Age, two shows that distract with distraction, keeping us company at the end of something. But I suspect the thing we are waiting for, the thing that might actually hold us, exists somewhere else entirely, beyond the screen.

All images: HBO

This article originally appeared on Harper'sBazaar.com


Also read: Meet the C-suite executives putting culture and creativity at the heart of business

Also read: The best satirical shows to stream right now that nail the madness of modern life