Christine Baranski still remembers the fateful evening at the 2012 Emmy Awards when she was seated near some of the stars of “Downton Abbey,” the celebrated PBS “Masterpiece” drama about a British country estate in the early 1900s.

Baranski, nominated for best supporting actress in a drama for “The Good Wife,” left without a trophy, which instead went to one of her “Downton” rivals. “I was competing against the inimitable Dame Maggie Smith, thinking I’d have a snowball’s chance,” she recalled.

But at an after-party later that night, Baranski encountered Julian Fellowes, the “Downton” creator. She had heard he was working on a follow-up series, and she took the opportunity to pay him her compliments.

“I would always be pea green with envy, watching all those fabulous actors in their fabulous outfits doing this period piece,” she said. “I thought, ‘why can’t the American actors get a shot at this?’ ”

A decade later, Baranski and a cast of dozens are getting that opportunity in “The Gilded Age,” a new period drama created by Fellowes that has its premiere Monday on HBO.

While not a direct follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” “The Gilded Age” is another sweeping historical series produced in similarly lavish style, set this time in 1880s New York amid the class conflicts between old money and the nouveau riche.

In its debut episode, “The Gilded Age” follows a fictional young woman, Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), and her new acquaintance Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) into the Manhattan home of Brook’s wealthy aunts, Agnes van Rhijn (Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon).

There they are drawn into the glamorous customs and merciless mores of upper-class New York life and the blue-blooded aunts’ rivalry with the prosperous arrivistes George and Bertha Russell (Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon), who have just built their new mansion across the street.

Pomp and pageantry

“The Gilded Age” brings all the pageantry and production value that “Downton Abbey” was known for — sumptuous sets and extravagant costumes, as well as a starry cast. It also carries the pedigree of Fellowes, a two-time Emmy winner for “Downton” and the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “Gosford Park.”

But “The Gilded Age” is arriving after a drawn-out development process, during which it relocated from NBC to HBO, and a production delayed by the pandemic. The series will test whether viewers want to turn to HBO for a historical costume drama in the “Downton Abbey” mold, and whether “Downton” was a once-in-a-career hit or a repeatable phenomenon.

Fellowes, who wrote all six seasons of “Downton Abbey” (a couple of episodes included co-writers) and its two film sequels, knows that these are precipitous stakes, though he prefers to see them as reflections of the runaway success that “Downton” enjoyed.

“The only way people are not going to have any expectations of you is if you’ve only ever written a flop,” he said in an interview. “I’d rather have the big success and see if I can survive it.”

In his research and writing for “Downton Abbey,” Fellowes explored the phenomenon of so-called “dollar princesses” — wealthy American heiresses of the 1800s and 1900s whom faltering European aristocrats married in order to bolster their dwindling fortunes.

That led Fellowes to further reading on dynastic American families like the Vanderbilts, the Astors and the Goulds, and the financial boom that followed the Civil War.

“The fortunes got bigger, the men got much more powerful, and everything was boiling over,” he explained. No longer content to pattern themselves on European nobility, these capitalist barons began spending their money “in an American way,” Fellowes said. “They didn’t just buy country houses in the middle of 40,000 acres — they built vast palaces that were 15 feet away from the one next door.”

But only the men were permitted to have careers and participate in politics. As Fellowes said, “Strong women who were imaginative and full of invention had to make it happen for themselves” — by inventing an implicitly hierarchical high society.

Changing networks

That history became the basis of “The Gilded Age,” which NBC commissioned from Fellowes in 2012, by which time “Downton Abbey” had become a global phenomenon. Another six years passed before NBC announced that it had slated the show for a 2019 debut. But when the spring of 2019 rolled around, instead of a premiere came the announcement that HBO was taking over the series.

Pearlena Igbokwe, chair of Universal Studio Group, said that “The Gilded Age” had been a coveted project at NBC, where she previously oversaw drama development. But it took several years for Fellowes to clear his plate of “Downton” duties, and once his “Gilded Age” scripts started to arrive, Igbokwe said, “the scope and ambition for the project was pretty epic.”

“It was fantastic, but it was a decidedly big show,” she said. “The network decided, we don’t want to restrict Julian’s vision in any kind of way, and we don’t know if we have the appetite for that vision.”

Other networks expressed interest in “The Gilded Age,” including HBO, which was then overseen by WarnerMedia entertainment chair Robert Greenblatt, who had originally signed up the series for NBC as its entertainment chair. (He has since left WarnerMedia and started his own production company.)

流行的延迟

But just as shooting was about to start in March 2020, the onset of the pandemic forced a months-long delay.

“It was like we were about to launch the Queen Mary and then, not so fast, we’re going back to the docks,” Baranski said. “It was painful.”

The delay cost “The Gilded Age” one of its principal cast members, Amanda Peet, who dropped out because of scheduling issues. She was replaced by Coon (“The Leftovers”), who assumed the role of Bertha Russell, an Alva Vanderbilt-like character who finds that her family’s newfound wealth has not earned her a perch in New York’s social hierarchy.

The long hiatus and gradual restart of production also allowed cast members like Benton (a Tony Award nominee for “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”) to seek refinements of their roles to better reflect their understanding of history.

Benton said she urged the “Gilded Age” creative team to provide more ways to show that there were Black people like her character, Peggy, who lived in their own affluent and educated communities.

Those same aspirations of authenticity also necessitated the actors’ daily ritual of getting dressed in elaborate, restrictive period clothing.

This became a particular burden for Coon, who was eight months pregnant by the end of the “Gilded Age” shoot. “There was a point where I couldn’t wear a corset anymore,” she said. “You’ll see some cleverly-timed horses and some hand acting to hide my stomach.”