"The Gilded Age" and the trouble with American period pieces

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Gilded Age delighted audiences with it's lavish sets, decadent costumes and social sniping when it debuted. Lucky for us, the period drama just returned to HBO Max with a second season. But if we look a little closer at the show, it reveals what we truly want out of period pieces: to remake the past with our modern sensibilities and values. As Brandon Taylor wrote in his essay called "morgan spector pls break me in half," The Gilded Age engenders "self-delusion" about our history – because to reflect our past more accurately, would be "too horrifying" for a somewhat soapy show. Brittany Luse sits down with Brandon to discuss sentimentality, why we're particularly drawn to this era now and how it's portrayal could be done better.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial,
0:04.5	celebrating each life with compassion and attention to detail that is second to none.
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0:15.6	visit dignity memorial.com.
0:22.0	Hey, hey, you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR.
0:25.1	I'm Brittany Luce.
0:26.4	And today on the show, we're talking about one of my favorite shows, The Gilded Age on
0:32.1	Max. It's back with the second season and I am so excited
0:37.0	because this is my soap. These are my stories. And my guest today, author and culture critic Brandon Taylor, feels the same.
0:46.6	I love the ridiculousness of the gowns, of the theater of it all.
0:51.8	The minute they were like, season two, I was like, I will be seated.
0:56.0	I will be ready.
0:58.4	We follow the families of railroad barons, bankers, and the upper, upper bourgeois,
1:04.0	and watch the battles between old money and new money unfold.
1:08.1	It's really about rich people being mean to rich people
1:10.2	at its heart, though I do think it thinks it has more on its mind than that.
1:14.7	But one of the most interesting characters on the show, and perhaps my favorite character,
1:19.3	is Peggy, an upper middle class black journalist.
1:23.0	Though she does lead me and Brandon
1:25.6	to have some questions about how post-civil war
1:29.2	black life is portrayed on the show.
1:31.5	And questions about why shows like this
	...

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