Writer Julian Fellowes takes a leaf out of his own book for new US drama The Gilded Age 

It is a well-recognized theme – a drama that charts the lives of the super-rich and their servants on the finish of the nineteenth Century.

The Gilded Age is a brand new TV present set in New York and is already being described because the American Downton Abbey.

However its creator Julian Fellowes – who wrote each – insists it’s ‘darker and edgier’ than his large British hit concerning the Crawley household. 

Heroine: Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), proper, might remind Downton followers of Woman Rose (Lily James), left

Nonetheless, Fellowes hopes that his nine-part US sequence, which begins on Sky Atlantic and Now on January 25, will replicate its success.

Whereas it’s set in a US metropolis within the Eighteen Eighties fairly than the Yorkshire of Downton a long time later, The Gilded Age options characters of a sort that made the British manufacturing a scores and monetary juggernaut.

Named after the interval of speedy US financial progress between 1870 and 1900, it showcases the huge wealth of New York’s elite – particularly between the rival van Rhijn and Russell households. 

Fellowes mentioned the tycoons on the head of those households have been the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk of their age, with limitless wealth.

Acid-tongued: Downton’s Dowager Countess of Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith), left, might have met her match in waspish widow Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), proper

Butlers: Carson (Jim Carter), left, serves the Crawleys, whereas Bannister (Simon Jones), proper, is the van Rhijns’ man

The 72-year-old mentioned he was astounded on the scale of the manufacturing, revealing: ‘The designers constructed three large units, one in every of which was the entire inside of the Russell home.

‘It was an unbelievable phantasm. Additionally they constructed an enormous outside set creating a fantastic chunk of Fifth Avenue and 61st Road.

‘I’ve by no means seen something prefer it – and I’ve been in showbusiness for 50 years.’

Fellowes intentionally solid most of the African-American characters as well-off and educated.

‘There was a considerable black, affluent center class. I discovered it fascinating that you would have a black narrative that was truthful, however not about victimhood.’