It’s Downton meets Dynasty

New York’s wealthiest families are at war in Julian Fellowes’ classy new drama

Legions of devoted Downton Abbey fans might have thought that there’s nothing more quintessentially British than a delicious period costume drama. But it seems we’ll all have to think again with the arrival from across the Atlantic of a new series chronicling life among the super-rich in 1880s New York.

Yet patriotic viewers need not despair – for The Gilded Age has sprung from the prolific and successful pen of British writer, peer and Downton creator Julian Fellowes. If anything, the megabudget nine-part saga is even more lavish than the tale of the Earl of Grantham and family.

It’s a world built out of the wealth of the railway barons of the age, forerunners of the oil-rich autocrats of Dallas and Dynasty a century later: the houses are palatially luxurious, the crinoline dresses swish with endless layers and for the lucky few at the top of society, there’s an army of staff to serve them.

Still, there is far more here than simply gawping at the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Fellowes’s gifts as a storyteller vividly bring to life the drama of a high society in which behind the superficially polite surface is a raging, no-holds-barred battle between egocentric characters to be top dog. This is a world every bit as class-ridden as old England, but in New York there’s not only a chasm between above and below stairs, but also a huge divide between old and new money.

Merciless tycoon George (Morgan Spector) has everything that cash can buy, but that doesn’t include the one thing his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon) truly wants: acceptance by the elite.

On the other side of the street from their vast new mansion are the epitome of ‘old’ New York: whiplash-tongued widow Agnes (Christine Baranski, above, with Carrie Coon) and her meek sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon, Sex And The City), into whose home they welcome their young niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson, daughter of Meryl Streep), after the death of her father plunges her into the unfamiliar environs of the big city.

And so the battle lines are drawn for an unashamedly entertaining treat in which the glossy visuals are matched by a script that drips with wit and acid ripostes.

And the Brits haven’t been entirely shut out: look for our own Simon Jones, who was George V in the Downton Abbey film and had a role in Brideshead Revisited, playing – what else? – the butler.