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Watch The Gilded Age for all the piping hot tea. ✨🫖

🎥 @gildedagehbo IG

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More Stills from The Gilded Age 3x02

📸 Karolina Wojtasik/HBO

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New Stills from The Gilded Age 3.02 "What the Papers Say" Photograph by Karolina Wojtasik/HBO

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The Gilded Age - Season 3 - Weeks ahead teaser

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The Gilded Age - Who's Up and Who's Down at the Beginning of Season 3

See where the characters stand, ahead of The Gilded Age Season 3 premiere this Sunday, June 22.

🎥 @gildedagehbo IG

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Inspiration, favorite spots, and the timeless magic of Central Park! ✨ Stars of "The Gilded Age" Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon share how they feel connected to New York City’s iconic backyard.

🎥 @centralparknyc IG

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Our favorite The Gilded Age sisters Agnes and Ada are back on June 22nd! Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon tease their shifting dynamics in Season 3 — Agnes isn’t used to not being the boss. 🙃😂

🎥 @extratv IG

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No new info but new clips!!

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Happy Fathers Day ACGAS

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Blake on season 3 of The Gilded Age, filmed at Tribeca film festival, June 12, 2025.

[Source: Brian Craig / Getty]

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Christine Baranski on the red carpet at The Gilded Age Season 3 premiere, talks about how Agnes has evolved from last season and what she hopes audiences will take away from the series.

The Gilded Age Premiere during the 2025 Tribeca Festival | BMCC Theater, NYC | June 12, 2025

🎥 Brian Craig/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival

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More from The Gilded Age Season 3 Premiere Q&A

2025 Tribeca Festival | BMCC Theater, NYC | June 12, 2025

🎥 @jenniferemilyfiore IG

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Cast photo shenanigans. ✨💕

The Gilded Age Season 3 Premiere | 2025 Tribeca Festival | BMCC Theater, NYC | June 12, 2025

🎥 @thegildedage, @catquinn, @justmejas_ , 📷 @isa.arraiza IG/stories

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It seems that Julian Fellowes may have been listening to the viewers who have said, lovingly or not, that nothing really happens on The Gilded Age. Season three of Fellowes’s prim and elegant soap opera about late 19th-century New Yorkers—which premieres on HBO on June 22—features more scandal, more raw emotion, and even some death and mayhem. But Fellowes has not over-egged the series in the pursuit of intrigue; Gilded Age remains mostly a pleasant, satisfying diversion.

As if to shake us from the stupor of expectation, Fellowes opens the season in an entirely surprising place: the wild west. A wagon charges across the deserts of Arizona, its vast orange expanse a far cry from the stately order of the Upper East Side. But this is where much of the era’s money is being made before it is siphoned back to New York—at least, most of the money made by George Russell (Morgan Spector), the railroad magnate whose nouveau riche family occupies the center of the series. As railways stretch to connect the coasts of America, men like Russell seize the enormous opportunity to develop their empire, betting their whole fortunes in the process.

Back home in the mansions, there’s little sign of the dust and danger that pays for all that opulence. While her husband stakes his claim in the west, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) turns east, toward the English aristocracy Bertha and her cohort so strenuously emulate. She has made a sort of backroom deal (or, really, opera box deal) to marry off her daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), to a British duke in need of a cash transfusion. Bertha, who is of humble extraction, figures that yoking her family to British nobility will finally assert the Russells as international sophisticates, laundering their new money with ancient tradition.

But Gladys doesn’t want to marry some random duke she barely knows. She’s got a genuine love interest puppy-dogging around, a nice boy from a nice family whom Bertha nonetheless deems beneath her family’s ambition. Her son, Larry (Harry Richardson), is also following his heart: he’s smitten not with some wealthy debutante hand selected by his mother, but with his decidedly more humble across-the-street neighbor, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson). Marian’s aunts have had a reversal of fortunes: spinster turned widow Ada (Cynthia Nixon) is now the one with the money, while her imperious sister Agnes (Christine Baranski) has been left penniless after a conwoman fleeced her ne’er-do-well son Oscar (Blake Ritson) out of their fortune. (Gay guys can’t be trusted with money.) Much tension comes from this upending of domestic hierarchy.

Marian’s friend (and Agnes’s secretary) Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) gets in on the mating game, too. She meets a suitable suitor, a handsome doctor from a prominent family, but must square off against his snobby and disapproving mother, played with regal menace by Phyllicia Rashad. This ultimately leads to Rashad having a showdown with her old Raisin in the Sun costar Audra McDonald, as Peggy’s mother Dorothy. It is, overall, a big season for the characters from the Black elite, with Peggy’s love story at the center.

The Gilded Age understands marriage as dynasty’s path to a secured future, as it was for centuries upon centuries. But Fellowes keeps his show tuned to the thrum of progress, steadily gaining volume. Divorce is a hot topic, a scandal that will cast a woman from the upper echelons of society—unless, of course, that society changes with the coaxing of a brash arriviste or two. Other supposed improprieties are discussed and rethought, specifically in a handful of scenes in which characters gingerly approach the topic of homosexuality with something like curiosity and compassion. A new century is rushing at these soon-to-be-dinosaurs, and maybe the old ways, like strategically arranged marriages and social shunning, will no longer do.

But real cultural shift is still a little ways off, and so The Gilded Age stays mostly rooted in tradition. For the rich folks, anyway. Down under the floorboards in the basement kitchens, things are moving more swiftly. Last season, Agnes’s footman Jack (Ben Ahlers) secured a patent for a new kind of alarm clock. That little journey of industry continues apace in season three, a sweet and wistful arc. Fellowes may have a strange attitude about the poor—on this show and on Downton Abbey, he routinely suggests a kind of happy poverty, the cozy pleasure of knowing one’s station in life—but he manages a convincingly complex evolution for Jack.

This season also has a bit of darker stuff, a pair of shocking scenes that disrupt the polite temperament of the show. One is a freak accident, the other an act of violence unlike anything Fellowes has done before. Both events may be melodramatic, but they also considerably liven the proceedings—connecting The Gilded Age to mortal risk, which the show’s characters have long seemed ignorant of or immune to. This is America, after all; violence is baked into the foundation.

Fear not, though. The season is still largely about parties and luncheons and furtive glances of longing and affection. It is about hats and bustles and corsets and sharp suits and carefully molded hair. And it is about codes of behavior in which Fellowes sees genuine tragedy—all that restriction, all those love affairs scuttled, all the access denied—but also a certain beauty. Fellowes’s devotion to rigid custom has always made his television shows fascinating objects for meta study. We learn something of Fellowes's own moral principle, his peccadillos, his sometimes priggish fixations, as we discover those of Gilded Age society. Season three suggests that Fellowes, too, may be evolving, pushing himself into a wider understanding of the world, with all the new allowances that come with that broader perspective. Cities change; so do writers.

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The real Gilded Age in American history was a time of rampant political corruption, flagrant consolidation of wealth, and grotesque racism. Depressing, right? Let’s talk instead about The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’ opulent period drama featuring sumptuous costumes, swoony romance, and an all-star cast that clearly delights in bringing this lavish soap to life. In the upcoming third season, Fellowes and his team continue to focus largely on the beauty of the titular era rather than its uglier realities. But the new episodes of HBO's Gilded Age finally deliver stories for its Black characters that are as robust as those for their white counterparts — and the result is the show's most satisfying and entertaining outing yet.

Though the season 2 finale aired nearly a year-and-a-half ago, the new episodes pick up just a few months later. Kindhearted Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) and her wealthy beau Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) are courting in secret, due to Miss Brook’s recent failed engagement to another man. Marian’s aunt Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) is usually quick to disapprove of her niece’s romances, but the stately socialite is too busy adjusting to her new penniless reality — and the fact that her widowed sister, Ada Forte (Cynthia Nixon), now holds the purse strings.

Over at the mansion across the street, Larry’s younger sister, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), is sneaking around with her milquetoast suitor, Billy Carlton (Matt Walker), even though she knows her mother — the formidable Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) — wants to marry her off to the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb). While Bertha’s husband George (Morgan Spector) opposes pushing his daughter into a marriage she doesn’t want, he remains more focused on his work acquiring the land and money needed to build a cross-country railroad line. As for the downstairs crew, the Van Rhijn’s footman, Jack Trotter (Ben Ahlers), waits anxiously as Larry Russell begins seeking a buyer for his patented alarm clock design. Meanwhile, the Russells' butler, Mr. Church (Jack Gilpin), and his staff seek to ferret out a spy who’s been leaking details about the family’s private life to the press.

For the first two seasons, the only Black character to have any interaction with the Fifth Avenue crowd was Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), the Brooklyn-based reporter and aspiring writer who also works as Agnes’ personal secretary. Though Peggy and her family — including her mother, Dorothy (Audra McDonald) and her pharmacist father, Arthur (John Douglas Thompson) — had their own storylines, the show never really delved into the world of the well-to-do Black elite who existed at that time.

With season 3, Fellowes and his co-writer, Sonja Warfield, correct this by extending its focus to the concentric social circles of Black and white New Yorkers — and at times even letting them shift and intersect. Theater lovers will be thrilled to learn that Gilded does, at long last, find a way to have McDonald’s Dorothy and Baranski’s Agnes share some scenes — under circumstances I won’t spoil. More importantly, the new season takes us inside Black high society. Peggy meets a handsome young doctor named William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), and much of their courtship takes place in Newport, R.I., where his affluent parents, Elizabeth (Phylicia Rashad) and Frederick (Brian Stokes Mitchell), live year-round.

The Gilded Age is equal parts history and fantasy, so it’d be unfair to expect a fully realistic depiction of the racism Peggy and company would actually face. Still, this season Fellowes allows the characters to have their most pointed conversations about race so far. Agnes informs the Scotts that she was brought up to treat everyone with “simple good manners,” prompting Arthur to respond, “I’m not convinced good manners will prove an effective cure for two and a half centuries of slavery.” Peggy and her family even encounter bias within their own community — specifically from Elizabeth, who disapproves of the Scott family due to their darker skin and Arthur’s past as a slave.

As always, Fellowes and Warfield balance the social issues of the time with domestic drama. Adding to Agnes’ umbrage about losing her fortune is Ada’s decision to get involved in the burgeoning temperance movement, which she sees as a way to honor her late husband. A well-known Fifth Avenue wife is blindsided when her husband announces he wants a divorce, which will leave her exiled from New York society — as per the rules established by the city’s social arbiter, Lena Astor (Donna Murphy). This gross imbalance of power between men and women is what drives Bertha to push Gladys into marriage with the Duke, because she understands the grim fact that a woman’s value is inexorably tied to the man at her side. Still, her unwillingness to take her daughter’s feelings into account — as well as a crisis in George’s business dealings — begins to put a strain on the Russells' marriage.

The performances remain stellar. Baranski reigns over every one of her scenes as Agnes, who wields her inflections as a master artist wields her brush. (“I’ll spend the rest of my days with society’s cast-offs, and women of ill-repute!”) Nixon brings a gentle strength to Ada, and Coon is haughty perfection as Bertha. Not only do we get the thrill of seeing Baranski and McDonald on screen together, but the latter’s Dorothy also has a gripping face-off with Rashad’s Elizabeth. (What a time to be alive!)

Once again, the guest cast is superb: Bill Camp, sporting a magnificent handlebar mustache, is gloriously gruff as Wall Street power broker J.P. Morgan, who joins George in his railroad scheme. Andrea Martin is suitably theatrical as Madame Dashkova, a so-called medium, and LisaGay Hamilton makes a welcome appearance as suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who recruits Peggy to her cause. Merritt Wever arrives as Bertha’s sister, Monica, who is as grounded and unfussy as Mrs. Russell is grand. (Apologies to the many, many other actors in this vast ensemble; you're all due individual accolades, but this review is already running long.)

The season’s only misstep comes in the finale, when the growing tension between George and Bertha builds to a climax that is somewhat confounding and — in this viewer’s opinion — out of character for George. The revelation feels particularly tacked on in an episode that’s otherwise filled with glamour (two balls!), a romantic proposal, and hard-fought social victories. But it’s a small quibble, and after three increasingly enjoyable seasons, perhaps it’s best to trust that Fellowes and Warfield know what they’re doing. As Bertha says to her disapproving husband, “I won’t question your business if you don't question mine.” Grade: A-

The Gilded Age season 3 premieres Sunday, June 22 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on HBO.

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The episode descriptions for 1 & 2 are out!!

Episode 1: Who Is In Charge Here?

Episode 2: What The Papers Say