Are The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey Connected? The Showrunner Answers

HBO’s The Gilded Age is actually drawing comparisons to Downton Abbey, and it is easy to see why! Each reveals are historic dramas set greater than a century in the past (though a couple of a long time aside), each function the glamour and extravagance of the ultra-wealthy elite, each showcase related character archetypes, and each are from the pen of sequence creator Julian Fellowes. Given all of those commonalities (and the truth that we stay on the earth of “prolonged universes”), might there maybe be a Downton Abbey/Gilded Age crossover on the best way?

Gareth Neame, who’s an government producer on each The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey, answered that query definitively: Nope, they don’t seem to be linked!

“[A crossover is] not within the considering in any respect,” Neame informed TVLine. “It is a separate universe, however they’re each fictions set within the Eighties. Downton Abbey, in its personal fiction, was positively there. A youthful model of the Maggie Smith character can be residing there, I assume. However it’s probably not deliberate.”

Neame’s reply shouldn’t be significantly shocking, nevertheless it’s additionally comprehensible why viewers may need the query. In any case, Downton Abbey‘s whole backstory hinges on a serious component of the particular Gilded Age period, which HBO’s The Gilded Age explores in much more element.

In the previous couple of a long time of the 1800s, “new cash” households in America turned fabulously rich via trade and commerce. Regardless of their wealth, they discovered the doorways to long-established high-society circles shut to them, and old-money households regarded down on them as interlopers. Looking for social status to match their wealth, many of those households set off to Europe, the place many aristocratic households have been in dire monetary straits. Though they did not exactly approve of the brand new, gaudy households both, many aristocratic heirs married American heiresses with huge dowries as a way of shoring up their precarious estates.

That is, as each Downton fan effectively is aware of, that present’s backstory: Cora is an American heiress (who would have been a younger girl round an identical time as The Gilded Age is about) who marries Robert, soon-to-be Earl of Grantham, in an organized match that grows right into a loving marriage.

For these hoping for Downton Easter eggs, it does not sound like these might be forthcoming. For these simply searching for a glitzy new historic drama, although, The Gilded Age is simply the precise decide!