‘The Buccaneers’ Arrives With More Arrivistes

A newly moneyed woman in Gilded Age New York is desperate to gain the acceptance of the aristocracy. So she schemes to get the ultimate symbol of old money approval: a box at the exclusive Academy of Music. When she is denied, she helps spearhead the construction of a new see-and-be-seen cultural playground, the Metropolitan Opera House. Take that, aristocracy.

Welcome to the second season of HBO’s opulent drama “The Gilded Age,” a series laden with emblematic showdowns between the gaudy arrivistes and the idle drawing-room class. By chance, “The Gilded Age,” which returned last week, is back just ahead of “The Buccaneers,” a new series on Apple TV+ that is set amid the same late 19th-century collision of old money and new, robber barons and debutante balls, gold diggers and status obsession.

“The Buccaneers,” which premieres Wednesday, sends its wealthy but not sufficiently connected young ladies, their frocks and their deeply insecure parents all the way to London, skipping the middleman of old American money and going right to the source in search of marriageable dukes and lords. As you might imagine, culture clashes and broken hearts ensue.

TV’s Gilded Age dramas are somehow both alluring and repellent. It’s fun to watch ugly Americans make like combative peacocks. And the social dynamics seem to resonate in the 21st century, even if the details feel exotic and unattainable.

“Hierarchy of classes is something that people seem to be more preoccupied with right now than at other times in the past,” said Esther Crain, the author of the lavishly illustrated “The Gilded Age in New York” and creator of the historical website Ephemeral New York, in a phone interview. “There’s this vast gulf between the very rich and everyone else, with a vanishing middle class. This really echoes the Gilded Age.”

The “Gilded Age” opera house showdown echoes a pitched battle from the end of Season 1, in which Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), the Academy of Music snub victim, hosts a buzzy ball at her palatial home for her teen daughter. She invites her daughter’s friend, whose mother, Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), is the unofficial gatekeeper of the old-money elite. But then the gatekeeper snubs the social climber, who subsequently disinvites the gatekeeper’s daughter. The chess game is on, and the children are the pawns.

In her book, Crain details the historical events behind both the music hall duel and the dance dust-up. In real life, it was Alva Vanderbilt who hosted a “fancy dress” masquerade ball in 1883, and who snubbed Mrs. Astor’s daughter, Caroline, prompting Mrs. Astor to show contrition to her nouveau riche rival. The showdown was seen as a major victory for new money over old.

The new rich, based in the Fifth Avenue mansions of Manhattan, were largely a product of the Civil War and new fortunes made in the railroad, copper, steel and other industries. (Bertha’s husband, George Russell, played by Morgan Spector, is a railroad tycoon who finds himself dealing with labor issues in Season 2.)

Unlike the old-money aristocracy who traced their wealth to their European ancestors, the new rich thrived in industry and flaunted their wealth, much to the old rich’s disgust and chagrin.

“They thought, ‘We’re Americans, we’re the new guys, we’ve got something new to sell in this world, and we have a place here,’” said the “Gilded Age” creator Julian Fellowes in a video interview from his home in London. “For me, the 1870s and 1880s was when modern America found itself. The new people building their palaces up and down Fifth Avenue were doing it the American way. This was an American culture — a new way of being rich, a new way of being successful.”

Of course, the new rich could also be reckless and dangerous. In Season 1 of “The Gilded Age,” George, who Fellowes modeled on the railroad magnate Jay Gould, drives a corrupt alderman to suicide. He lives not just to defeat his opponents, but to crush them and their families. For him and his ilk, capitalism is a blood sport.

The games are a little different (if only slightly less brutal) in “The Buccaneers,” which is based on an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton. Looked down upon by the New York aristocracy and seeking suitable husbands, five young nouveau riche women high-tail it to London, where they and their financial resources are coveted by title-rich but cash-poor families. Nan (Kristine Froseth) is courted by a sensitive duke. Conchita (Alisha Boe) has a frisky marriage with a lord, whose parents are monstrous, anti-American snobs. All have romantic escapades that are, in many ways, brazenly transactional.

“The girls’ mothers are coming over to London in order to effectively sell their girls into the aristocracy,” Katherine Jakeways, the series’s creator, said in a video interview from her London home. “And the aristocracy are welcoming them with open arms because they’ve got roofs to mend.”

Added Beth Willis, an executive producer, from her home in Scotland: “How lonely that would be for so many of them. In America they might speak up a bit more at the dining table. They sometimes had their own money. And to come over to England and find these freezing cold houses with roofs literally falling in and being treated like a cash point must have just been awful.”

Here, too, there is historical precedent. In one example, the socialite Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the shipping-and-railroad Vanderbilt family, married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, becoming perhaps the best known of what were called the “dollar princesses.”

“Some of these marriages were arranged and didn’t end happily, but others did end happily,” said Hannah Greig, a historical consultant for “The Buccaneers.” “Sometimes the origins of the marriage were forgotten, and it became a love story. History offers lots of examples that you can draw on, for all of the different experiences that we see in ‘The Buccaneers.’”

Both series include characters representative of people who existed in Gilded Age society, even if they were under-acknowledged at the time. In “The Buccaneers,” Mabel (Josie Totah) is torn between a marriage of convenience, to a man, and a romance of passion, with her friend Conchita’s new sister-in-law (Mia Threapleton). In “The Gilded Age,” the old-money Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) carries on a passionate affair with John Adams, a scion of the presidential dynasty, all the while plotting his own marriage of convenience (and wealth) with the Russells’ debutante daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga). (In a refreshing twist, the most avid gold diggers in both series are men.)

One of the central characters in “The Gilded Age” is Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a representative of 19th-century New York’s Black elite. At odds with her tradition-minded druggist father, Peggy goes to work for the real-life pioneering Black journalist T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) and blazes her own trail, even as she faces down racism in her everyday life.

Peggy’s story line gives the series a chance to look at issues of inequality that festered beneath the surface of the Gilded Age.

“This season especially we see questions about the direction of Black America,” said Erica Dunbar, a Rutgers University history professor and “Gilded Age” historical consultant, in a video interview. “It’s a theme that still exists. What is the best way to move forward for a group of people who have already been marginalized or oppressed for hundreds of years at this point?”

It all unfolds against a bloodless but volatile civil war between those who have been rich a long time and their freshly minted competition. The aristocracy’s view of the barbarians at the gate can be summed up by Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who has no interest in letting the newbies crash the party: “You shut the door, they come in the window.”

But this is a fight Agnes won’t win. She can lock her windows, but the Metropolitan Opera House is coming soon. Despite the pitched battles of yore, if there’s one thing we’ve learned since it’s that money is money. And those who have the most generally have the upper hand, no matter the source of their riches.