Gosford Park? Yes, more cutting. (I also think this is the contribution of Robert Altman). I just did a Downton Abbey to celebrate my new TV and its stakes were below the floor. Lord Grantham really wants to win the cricket match! He’s sad not to be in charge of the WWI statue! The Dowager Countess expects to win the…

“We find out where the Russells came from — what modest/impoverished origins do they have?”

RE: Agnes and Ada rarely leaving the house, wasn’t it mentioned somewhere at the start of the series how they have money, but not a huge amount? Enough to keep the servants employed, but not enough to be constantly out about town like those New Rich? That might help explain their situation.

I should also add that Ike signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It created the civil rights division of the DOJ and empowered federal prosecutors to pursue interference with the right to vote. The 1957 Civil Rights Act was the first civil rights law since reconstruction, and it helped pave the way for the…

How about the mic drop of the main cast waltzing to the show’s theme song?!

Raikes gets run over by a train.

Ike also sent the 101st Airborne in to desgregate Little Rock High School when the Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus, defied the Supreme Court and activated the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock High.

It’s pretty, but not much else: 

I got a little too hyped up after reading some theories that Tom, as her family’s attorney, knew Marian’s state of finances better than she and took advantage of it: that he has either done something to get her family fortune or Marian can’t inherit until she marries, so that’s where Tom finds his opportunity. Doesn’t…

The reviewer missed the full significance of the plot point. The chef had started out as a poor American - a ‘no one with nothing’, but with the aid of his wits and “tenacity” he rose to the top of a fairly exclusive profession. And he became someone else, a new identity that includes assuming a culture that wasn’t…

Let Ada hook up with someone. (Who is the Che Diaz of gilded age NYC?)

Well we are living through the second Gilded Age. The comparisons have been made for awhile now. And don’t think that wasn’t the plan all along. The Republicans have never gotten over Teddy Roosevelt (one of their own!) the trustbuster (FDR really drove them wild.) They miscalculated with Eisenhower, who turned out to…

I don’t understand the decision to make Agnes basically a shut-in.  She’s worried about being on the outs with Mrs. Astor because it would interfere with her busy schedule of sitting in the parlor and being annoyed when anyone visits?

Marian is an asshole, and Larry deserves much better.

1. They can still say “our French-trained chef.” I don’t see what the big fucking deal is. The “problems” these people have make me even angrier about TODAY’s wealth inequality. Is a French chef the 1880's equivalent of having a spaceship company?

My assumption is it was spelled that way because it was pronounced so heinously by the characters in the show. It made me roll my eyes and I’m from Wichita so I’ve heard it pronounced a million different ways.

This show is a perfect counterpoint to the nerve-racking shows on my current watch list (Severance, The Maid). These sort of low-stakes shows seem to be filling the space that hangout shows like Friends or Seinfeld once occupied.

Eight months.

I wish they’d juxtapose the fancy folk with, say, some penniless immigrants dying of cholera or something. Just to, you know, establish the actual stakes of all this flummery. 

I believe the HBO extras mention that Carrie Coon was very very pregnant by the filming of the last few episodes.  Thus the cut of her dresses to hide her bump.