“What’s up, my absolute Goats? Based Edwardian influencer and olden-days content creator Edith Wharton here. I’d like to tell you about my hot new jam, The Buccaneers, which just dropped on Apple TV+ and is about a bunch of wild and crazy girlbosses who like to party,” is probably what Edith Wharton would say if she was out promoting The Buccaneers. And she would write it out with a quill or carve it on a cave wall or post it to Bebo or whatever people did before ChatGPT.
Middle-aged Irish Times readers (aka Irish Times readers) will instantly go, “But Edith Wharton didn’t talk in such newfangled slang!” To your children, however, the slang I’ve used here is so ancient and outdated as to be Shakespearean. I think it is Shakespearean. It’s probably something Titus Andronicus said.
The Buccaneers is an unfinished novel by Wharton, which means you can do whatever you want with the adaptation. And what the creators at Apple want is Bridgerton. Thus, The Buccaneers has all the anachronistic dialogue, muscled hunks and contemporary pop music that entails, with a dash of Sex in the City and a pinch of The Virgin Suicides for good measure. Perhaps Wharton would have finished her novel by saying, “And I expect you’ve been imagining a soundtrack of indie pop for the whole novel, and that’s definitely what I had in mind, and don’t let no snooty critic tell you otherwise!”
In the first scenes we are introduced to a bunch of free-spirited gals in New York. They spend their free time giggling, dancing together and lounging about while wearing Victorian underwear, much as we do here at The Irish Times. In a later scene a character entreats her friends to “Be the party! We are the party!” before they loosen their clothes and do some grooving to pop music. This includes, at one point, some light twerking on an aristocrat. I imagine this whole interlude is taken line for line from the book. “Be the party! We are the party!” is, of course, a very Wharton thing to say.
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In the first episode one of these youngsters, Conchita (Alisha Boe), is wedding a British aristocrat; the rest are invited to London, where the genteelly impoverished gentry vie for their jewel-encrusted hands in marriage. For the most part, the Brits are appalled by our heroes’ crude modern ways. Wharton is, of course, famous for protagonists who let it all hang out and rudely shun propriety. Take the early-1990s film adaptation of her novel King Ralph. Sorry, I mean The Age of Innocence – which, now I think of it, was actually about how buttoned-up and conservative the American upper class were. They weren’t like these manifest destiny-infested yobs at all. “We’re Americans. When did we ever care about what they think of us?” says Conchita, which pretty much sums up the whole national project.
The money-hungry aristocrats are not, thankfully, the anaemic drips depicted in paintings but total hunks who think nothing of stripping to the waist for an impromptu swagger. Indeed, we meet one of them as he emerges from the sea, much like Poldark before him and Mr Darcy before that. The sea is, I believe, where televisual hunks are spawned. Many the girl dreams of finding a beached hunk.
Our heroine, who coincidentally has the same name as my grandmother, Nan, isn’t as interested in marriage as her sister and friends. But she knows what she wants, what she really, really wants, and it’s ye olde girl power. She is appalled by the way British debutantes are paraded and judged. “They’re also human beings. They’re funny and smart!” she protests, remaining oddly unmoved by the plight of the servants waiting on her hand and foot, who are presumably also funny and smart but don’t get any dialogue or pleas for emancipation.
Nan (Kristine Frøseth) is forever climbing literal walls and swimming in the sea. Her hobbies include running about and laughing delightfully with her hair askew. Before you know it Nan has attracted the interest of more than one aristocrat who realises she is not like other girls. “The girls I generally meet don’t think or talk so freely or so passionately,” says the sea hunk from earlier.
This hunk is a duke. And he is tired of being a duke but not tired enough to give his stuff away, just tired enough to hate all the desperate women who want to marry him. He likes Nan because she doesn’t know he’s a duke; he keeps his identity secret to test her. Poor Nan. Her other suitor is a scheming cad. There are a lot of secrets in this programme. There are secret babies, secret origins and two secret lesbians who share a moment while hiding in a literal closet. There is also, in the second episode, one of the steamy sex scenes that Wharton is famous for. And, on two separate occasions, we see bums, clearly a reference to Wharton’s other unfinished work, Bumtropolis: The Big Book of Bums. (Full disclosure: I’m not an expert on Wharton.)
Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age (Sky Atlantic and Now TV) has returned. It begins with a pleasant montage of hat boxes being opened and characters putting on hats. If Fellowes had his way the whole show would just be people trying on hats. He probably pitched the series to HBO as a 19th-century unboxing video. Subsequently, they made him add character and plot, but you can tell by the way he lovingly films servants laying out cutlery or society ladies promenading in frocks that that’s where his heart is.
There’s no anachronistic rock music here. Fellowes is far too respectful of the 19th century and how wonderful it was for all concerned. So it’s pizzicato strings and piccolos the whole way down. And the excellent cast aren’t called on to act much. Christine Baranski delivers most of her lines with the same tone from the same chair (I think she might be asleep), and Nathan Lane just seems to be doing a Foghorn Leghorn impression, if not sometimes texting his agent in the corner of a shot.
Fellowes has no sense of proportion. He gives a plot about an American butler struggling with British table settings (the Fellowes happy place) as much screentime as the experiences of a middle-class black family in a bigoted 19th-century New York (a subject worthy of its own show). The gist of the Fellowpian worldview is that the struggles of the precarious servant class and the struggles of the moneyed families who employ them are both difficult in their own way (“So why we gotta fight?” to quote Edith Wharton). Indeed, if The Gilded Age didn’t start life as “Untitled Hat Unboxing Project” I assume its working title was “Julian Fellowes’ Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems”.
One of the relatable issues with which the Russell family are dealing this season is how the rise of organised labour can impact on one’s railroad enterprise. “How do we get the better of these unions?” asks striving robber baron George, a sentence we’ve all asked our families and servants. It’s an issue that will no doubt be resolved in future episodes with a minimum of unpleasantness. In fairness, The Gilded Age is gentle on the eyes and the mind, and that’s probably the point. It might as well just be poshos trying on hats.
