In 'The Gilded Age' Season 2 Trailer, Change Is Coming to Old New York
HBO has released the trailer of the second season of Julian Fellowes' ambitious American-set period drama The Gilded Age ahead of its premiere in October and if the first look clip is anything to go by, there's a lot of drama brewing in the world of late-nineteenth-century New York. The society battle between the old money elites of Manhattan and the up-and-coming nouveau riche strivers who made their wealth through industry was a major plot point of the series' first season and it certainly seems as though things are set to escalate substantially in its second.
Season 2 begins in the spring of 1883, with the news that Bertha Russell's bid for a box at the Academy of Music --- the venue that most of Manhattan's elite patronize --- has been rejected. Furious, she decides to back the upstart Metropolitan Opera with her wealth and patronage instead and directly challenges Mrs. Astor's grip on high society. Not content to simply be fighting at one end of a class war, it also appears that Bertha's husband, the billionaire industrialist George Russell, is facing a labor strike, presumably amongst his rail line workers, and seems rather put out that his employees are organizing for better pay and working conditions.
As for our other society heavy hitters, Agnes van Rhijn remains as opposed to change as ever, insisting that her niece Marian --- who has secretly taken a job teaching at a girls' school --- focus on finding a suitable husband and disparaging her sister Ada's blossoming new courtship. And, in Brooklyn, as the Scott family begins to heal from the shocking discovery that closed out Season 1, Peggy taps into her activist spirit through her work with T. Thomas Fortune at the NY Globe.
