The servants of “The Gilded Age” are back on our screens, and so is the fantasy America seems unable to quit: that extreme wealth is glamorous, that poverty is quaint, and that the people polishing the silver are somehow part of the family. Season four arrives amid a real-life gilded age of our own—billionaires launching themselves into space while nurses pick up extra shifts, hedge funds buying up single-family homes while young couples give up on ever owning one. We are living through a second Gilded Age, and unlike the HBO series, ours has no costume department to make it look pretty.
That’s the uncomfortable magic trick of the show. Julian Fellowes gives us corsets and carriages, butlers and ballrooms, and we sigh with pleasure. Yet the original Gilded Age—roughly 1870 to 1900—wasn’t a costume drama. It was a period of brutal inequality, child labor, company towns, and strikes put down by private armies. The “robber barons” of the era didn’t just throw lavish parties; they crushed unions, bought senators, and treated their workers as interchangeable parts. We remember the dresses. We forget the Pinkertons.
Sound familiar? It should. Today, the top one percent of American households hold roughly thirty times the wealth of the bottom fifty percent. Billionaires have doubled their fortunes since the pandemic began. Meanwhile, more than half of American workers say they couldn’t cover a four-hundred-dollar emergency. We have our own Mrs. Astors, our own Newport mansions, our own desperate servants—except now they’re called gig workers, and they’re delivering your groceries while you binge-watch a show about how charming it all was.
The genius of “The Gilded Age” is that it lets us feel nostalgic for a world almost none of us would have survived. If you were born poor in 1885, your life expectancy was roughly forty years, your children likely worked in a mill, and your landlord might also own the store where you were forced to shop. The show’s upstairs characters fret about seating arrangements at dinner. The downstairs characters fret about keeping their jobs and their dignity. That’s not a historical curiosity; it’s a mirror.
And that’s the problem. We are not watching history. We are watching a soothing bedtime story about inequality, one where the rich are mostly well-meaning and the poor are mostly grateful. The series asks us to root for Marian Brook’s romantic prospects and Bertha Russell’s social climb, not for the eight-year-old breaker boys in the coal mines or the immigrant women working sixteen-hour days in shirtwaist factories. It’s comfortable. It’s beautiful. It’s a lie of omission.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that we’ve been here before—and we know how it ended. The first Gilded Age produced the Progressive Era, trust-busting, the income tax, and the labor movement, all because ordinary people finally said enough. Today, we have the same anger, the same exhaustion, but we also have streaming services ready to sell us the past as entertainment. We can watch the servants and feel bad for them, then close the laptop and forget that the same system is running right now, outside our windows, in our own zip codes.
Season four will be gorgeous. The costumes will win awards. The acting will be superb. And when it’s over, we’ll go back to our lives, where the gilded age never actually ended—it just changed its clothes.
We don’t need another season of nostalgia. We need to stop pretending that the past was charming and start asking why the present looks so much like it.