Who Is in Charge Here?

Season 3 first ep is significant improvement, feels like the show finally hitting its stride. The show's focus on class warfare and social commentary is still there, but now with well developed characters and good performances. Christine Baranski is terrific as always as is Carrie Coon, playing characters who are simultaneously privileged and oppressed at the same time.

But finally I'm beginning to care about what happens to the characters, and not just "rich people problems".

While the show still has flaws, with uneven pacing, Season 3 has started strong, and is starting to be a lot of fun to watch.

Very good story again from Julian, but I'm sorry, the acting is weak. Morgan Spector, Christina Baranski, Ben Ahlers, Cynthia Nixon, and Harry Richardson are good. Everybody else, not so. Just totally weak. The directing has zero punch. They need to import English actors and actresses if they're going to save this show. The sets are great. But I'm sorry: sets and script are not enough for an excellent series. I found myself bored except for when those actors were in the scene. This episode so disappointing especially after the last one in which Mrs. Russell beat out Lady Astor in the opera competition.

Oh wow, this season is just chef's kiss with all the delightfully ham-fisted (and hilariously overdue - because apparently someone missed the memo that this approach is pure self-sabotage) feminism and anti-racism and so on messaging shoved down our throats. It's so not organic and natural, you can practically taste the desperation! The dialogue sounds like it was churned out by some generic AI. Every conversation feels robotic and lifeless, like the characters are just reciting pre-programmed responses instead of having actual human interactions. What a enourmous pity HBO! Netherless also the story Line...

I love this show! The writing, the casting, the acting, costumes, sets, etc! I just came on here to say, in this episode, the leading characters all joke and mock how silly the Temperance movement is, as if its leaders are unreasonable, religious ladies who want everybody to stop drinking alcohol and be pure, their body is a temple of God, etc. That is not why the Temperance Movement was built. Back in the 1800s, women were property of their husbands. Many alcoholic men would beat the crap out of their wives, and were legally allowed to do it. If a women left her husband, he could drag her back and there was nothing she could do about it. If he left her and wanted custody of their children, he could take her children away and there was nothing she could do about it. So the Temperance Movement was to get men to stop drinking so that women would stop getting beaten and murdered.

After two excellent seasons of the Gilded Age, we're now all familiar with its principal characters and their hopes and their dreams in New York in the 1880s.

So now the writers are free to focus on the cultural aspects of American society during that age that brought opportunity and limitations to an individual-- according to their wealth, their gender, their race and even their marital status or sexual orientation. And its so much fun to watch.

Its wonderful to immerse yourself a show that's not dependent on graphic violence in order to tell a good story about how society affected people's lives in the late 19th century!