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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
53
Mixed:
22
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Fellowes has attempted to recapture the magic of Downton Abbey in other projects, like Doctor Thorne and Belgravia. Here, though, he actually pulls it off. Each new episode left me more ravenous for more. ... It has all the escapist charm of the historic costume drama blended with the savage energy of most evening soaps. It is the show Downton Abbey fans have been waiting for.
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It's early to pronounce this fully as another "Downton"-like addiction, with one movie and another on the way. Yet Fellowes has laid out the foundation for a period soap with that lofty potential, in what is already a very enticing piece of "Abbey"-adjacent real estate.
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Jun 23, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Agnes decides that she [Peggy] needs to see her doctor. Ada is skeptical, but Agnes sees a way to assert control over what used to be her house. It blows up in a way that’s personally embarrassing, not to mention legitimately dangerous for Peggy when the doctor refuses to treat a Black patient. As silly and fun as The Gilded Age usually is, scenes like these remind us that this time period was silly and fun for few.
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ColliderJan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Gilded Age can occasionally feel like it's spinning its wheels rather than chugging full-steam ahead. ... Later on, however, the series starts to generate more momentum, courtesy of bigger drama and more severe repercussions for certain characters' actions, and it's in those events that The Gilded Age establishes itself as a title wholly independent of any that might have come before — provided viewers are willing to wade through the filler to get to the substance.
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
As with Downton Abbey, Fellowes' impulse to explore the nuances of his series' world sometimes seem at odds with his instincts as a storyteller. ... Yet, also as with Downton Abbey, it's pretty tough to resist, both because Fellowes is so skilled at setting up suspense about what will happen next and the rich performances of the cast.
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Oct 17, 2025
Season 3 Review:
“The Gilded Age” has always plied high-toned melodrama as its chief asset, but Season 3 ripens the starched formality of previous episodes into succulence. Intertwining plots are rife with reversals of fortune, starting with the Russells’ neighbors across the street.
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Oct 30, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Some storylines flow more satisfyingly than others, but it all passes easily and, at choice moments, humorously, as Fellowes goofs on the excesses of rich Americans and gives us Nathan Lane as a soulless hanger-on with an absurd drawl. The best reason to watch is Carrie Coon.
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Oct 30, 2023
Season 2 Review:
It is a grand and complicated tapestry, and while Bertha is doing whatever she can to make Caroline Astor kneel before her, everyone else is dealing with their own, more palpable triumphs and tragedies. With a world this big, everyone in the audience is likely to prefer some characters and stories over others.
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Oct 30, 2023
Season 2 Review:
There are actual plots now! Fast-moving plots—with real consequences! And twists! The power dynamics between characters have changed, blessing us at long last with some meaty feuds and villains over which to obsess! And people are finally doing some capital-A acting!
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RogerEbert.comOct 27, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Fellowes focuses on what made the first season so successful but allows the show's sprawling cast to shine with the introspection each of their characters must face. Though it may never live up to the global success of “Downton Abbey,” this new series has made a name for itself on its own.
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Oct 27, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The first season of “The Gilded Age” sometimes felt as if it repeated its premises so compulsively it forgot to develop them. The best thing I can say about this new season, besides the fact that it’s fun, and that a lot more happens, is that it doesn’t make the same mistake.
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Oct 26, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The spell cast is more softly narcotic than it is soporific—it’s relaxing, not tedious. A cast of New York theater legends helps keep things lively, all seeming to relish in the chance to put on some fine costumes and swan around with old-timey decorum. Nixon is particularly affecting this season, as Ada’s life is irrevocably altered by the arrival of a new character.
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Jan 28, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Julian Fellowes delivers must-see TV with an all-star, Americanized spin on his beloved “Downton Abbey’ and creates a glittering feast for the eyes and ears. Is the series more playful than profound, more froth than substance? Maybe. It's also perfectly irresistible.
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Jan 27, 2022
Season 1 Review:
“The Gilded Age” may not offer penetrating insights into the late 19th century, or the vast gulf between tycoons building extravagant empires and the poverty of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Fellowes and his collaborators instead seem focused on maintaining a light, satiric touch. It may not be illuminating, but “The Gilded Age” is undeniably entertaining.
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The TelegraphJan 25, 2022
Radio TimesJan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Gilded Age harnesses the best of Fellowes' writing and applies it to American history. While slow at points, this HBO drama is set to be a hit with Downton fans and while not as saucy as Bridgerton, The Gilded Age will certainly appeal to the romantics out there.
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
In its early going, “The Gilded Age” struggles in one area — dialogue — but excels in enough others to keep viewers of the right cast of mind engaged. To borrow a phrase, the show’s ambition has written a check that, thanks to elegant acting and careful attention to detail, “The Gilded Age” can cash.
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Oct 24, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The Gilded Age Season 2 represents a marked improvement over the series’ first outing and concludes by leaving enough dangling plot threads to point the way to an even stronger third season. And while its gaudy delights may occasionally seem a little gauche, viewers everywhere will have a great time rolling about in its excess.
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IndieWireJun 12, 2025
Oct 24, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The Gilded Age Season 2 continues that fine tradition with a fierce rivalry over the creation of the Metropolitan Opera and a thread about the invention of a better alarm clock, even while bigger issues brew in the background. Sometimes, it feels like these characters aren’t just living in a different era, but living on their own planet. It’s a fun planet to escape to, either way.
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IndieWireJan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
“Downton Abbey” detractors may see too many similarities to invest in the next chapter of Julian Fellowes’ “Gosford Park” successors. But if you’re normally enamored with period dramas, Masterpiece on PBS, or well-orchestrated ensemble pieces, “The Gilded Age” should provide plenty of entertainment in the weeks to come.
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Oct 30, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Given the frothy, at worst PG-rated shenanigans that preoccupy these upper-crust New Yorkers and their servants, the series also still feels like something of an outlier for HBO, but an enjoyable one. If that’s not enough to elicit thunderous applause, in keeping with the spirit of the season, it’s certainly worthy of an opera clap.
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Jan 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
What's important for the viewer is whether you see these remakes and enjoy how they're being employed in a broader and more ostentatious stage, or scoff at Fellowes' nearly precise lifts from Wharton or her male contemporary Henry James. ... All of it dares a certain kind of "Masterpiece" acolyte to complain missing the relative quietude of English countryside and nitpick over elocutionary details. The rest of us will be content to drool at each of Bertha's fabulous dresses or chortle at Agnes' quick comebacks.
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Social ills are in there—more than window dressing, less than focus—but the main drive or intent of The Gilded Age is to titillate like a good gossip session might. To make the audience feel the giddy tingle of whispered scandal, to be lulled by the formality of upper crust decorum. If that stuff didn’t work for you when Downton reigned supreme, it likely won’t again when The Gilded Age arrives on Monday. And that’s just fine.
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It’s an elegantly told, gorgeously designed, and finely acted tale. ... There are a lot of balls in the air in “The Gilded Age,” and Fellowes isn’t quite a master of them all yet. In service of another trend in period shows, Fellowes occasionally looks back at the era from a contemporary perspective, also with uneven results.
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RogerEbert.comJan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
“The Gilded Age” is mostly interested in exploring Marian’s status as a window into both worlds, which isn’t nearly as exciting as one would hope. ... Still, a lot of narrative chickens have yet to roost, and there are enough ephemeral delights in “The Gilded Age” to make it worth an initial gander.
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Jun 20, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Three seasons in, The Gilded Age has barely explored its huge cast of servant characters. Like Downton, it has more sympathy for—and curiosity about—aristocrats desperate to keep fortunes they didn’t earn than it does for workers whose pursuit of happiness is enshrined in America’s founding documents.
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TV Guide MagazineNov 2, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The stakes couldn't be lower or sillier in Season 2, but the production values couldn't be higher. Ignore the simpering self-righteousness of the show's younger characters to luxuriate in the costumes, staggering interiors and barbed banter of the upper classes. [6 - 26 Nov 2023, p.9]
The GuardianOct 30, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The chemistry between Bertha and George is off the Edith Wharton scale. Still, they remain one-dimensional: made purely of ambition, like the American myth itself. Also the dialogue, in general, is like second-rate champagne. It never fizzes as it should. It takes some effort to give Oscar Wilde a cameo and grant him not one quotable line. And yet. Fellowes’ conservatism is served with just enough perspective to prevent it tipping over into a complete endorsement of the establishment.
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Jan 21, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Because he works with types—types he himself has established in his various programs—Mr. Fellowes can move the narrative along its track without sacrificing dialogue to the inconvenience of character development. We know who these people are. They're clichés—not unpleasant but wholly unsurprising. ... The real drama resides in the Russells, who are the least believable characters in the series. (Only five episodes were made available for review, which doesn't bode well, but maybe it gets better?)
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
For the most part, it entertains without illuminating. Fellowes recycles too many of his favorite archetypes, from the closeted gay couple to the scheming servant. And while he includes two households’ worth of “below stairs” characters, their story lines go largely undeveloped in the five episodes sent for review.
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Jan 20, 2022
Season 1 Review:
None of the stories are dull, but they’re somewhere between bland and familiar. The same is true of the look of The Gilded Age. ... At its best, Downton Abbey was a brainy, polished soap opera of the highest order and, thus far, The Gilded Age could use more of that soapiness.
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The PlaylistJan 20, 2022
Jun 20, 2025
Season 3 Review:
There’s a flimsy gold-plating applied to the eight episodes of the new season. How bad? Susan Sontag once defined “camp” as “failed seriousness.” The third season of “The Gilded Age” is failed camp. .... Aside from [Ms. Baranski and] Mr. Lane in his infrequent appearances, seems to know he or she is in a comedy (or should be). That said, Mr. Ritson gives a startlingly soulful performance as Oscar.
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Jan 27, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The whole thing feels much too rote and timid for HBO—even if the costumes deliberately evoke modern sensibilities and wouldn’t be out of place on the ladies of And Just Like That, who are trying as resolutely to assert their relevance in a changing world as Agnes is. The mood is too saturnine, the occasional nods to social criticism too stilted.
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Jan 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Beyond a normal, warmblooded amount of interest in a developing love triangle between Marian, a handsome young solicitor (Thomas Cocquerel), and the maybe-slightly-more-handsome young scion of the Russell family (Harry Richardson), I truly can’t bring myself to care about these people and their airless drawing room lives.
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Jan 24, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The series’s headlining star is Carrie Coon, who’s trapped in an iciness from which Fellowes barely lets her stir. (She’s hardly alone; the sprawling cast is chockablock with beloved actors, nearly all saddled with frustratingly underwritten characters.) ... Apart from Peggy, whose journeys between the Black and White New Yorks provide some novelty, there is hardly anyone to root for or invest in.
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Oct 25, 2023
Season 2 Review:
If the show gets one thing right, it’s that wealth does not confer intelligence. Maybe the series wouldn’t leave me so cranky if it weren’t both so dull and overscored, with quivering strings and heralding horns. Everything is about desire, absent interiority or human complexity.
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The GuardianJan 25, 2022
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