HBO Max: “The Gilded Age” written by Julian Fellowes

HBO’s “The Gilded Age” (a term coined by Mark Twain) is a tough show to pigeonhole because so much is good about it and so much is bad about it.

What’s good about TGA it captures a picture of New York at a special moment in time. The 1880s marked a turning point of sorts for New York elites: a turning away from the old New York Dutch families (e.g, the Astors and their ilk) and a gravitation toward the new upstarts (like the Vanderbilts, the Stewarts, and the Rockefellers).

Team Old New York is represented in TGA by Agnes Van Rein (played odiously by the usually likable and funny Christine Baranski), Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), and Ward McAllister (played by Nathan Lane with a Foghorn Leghorn accent). Team Upstart is led by George and Bertha Russell (Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon), the nouveau riche who are eager to make their place in the worlds of New York business and society, respectively.

Young Marian (Louisa Jacobson), whose father has passed away, comes to live with her father’s sisters, Aunt Agnes (Baranski) and her spinster Aunt Ada (a simpering Cynthia Nixon). On her way to New York from Doyleston, PA, she meets Peggy Scott (Denee Benton), a young Black woman who is seeking to make her way in New York as a writer.

But let’s get to the good parts, shall we? The mansions. The interiors. The elaborate dinner parties. And the costumes! You’ve never seen so many bustled women in your life nor wondered how they were able to sit down while wearing them. “Everybody says they’re making them smaller nowadays,” Agnes is told. “I am not everybody,” the arch-traditionalist Agnes frostily responds.

What’s so bad about TGA? The dialogue, written by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”) which is laden with so many expressions borrowed from the 21st century you may drop your pince-nez. The settings: “Downton” was filmed at a mansion. TGA was filmed on tacky stage sets. And the casting: usually likable actors like Kelly O’Hara, Audra McDonald, and Christine Nielsen seem seriously and surprisingly unappealing.)

The big question for AugNation is: why the need to profile these self-absorbed uber-rich folks or care about their welfare? Especially as immigrants begin pouring in from Italy and Eastern Europe, again changing the complexion of New York forever. But maybe the melding of these starkly different social classes is what eventually made America a great nation. So I say regard TGA as a guilty pleasure whose heart is in the right place. And that would be right on Fifth Avenue.