‘The Gilded Age’ takes bigger strides in Season 2

Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who created and scripts HBO MAX’s “The Gilded Age” series, knew that for the second season of this period drama about baronial excess, the question was simple: How do you get bigger?

With its large ensemble led by Carrie Coon, Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski, “Gilded” accurately (if fictionally) chronicles the booming 1880s period in New York City that gives the show its name.

“For Season 2 we wanted to open it up a little, give more of the context, that kind of thing,” Fellowes, 74, said during a virtual Zoom press conference. “After the first series I knew I didn’t have to be nervous writing anything.”

One of the surprises in Season 1 was that alongside the wealthy elite of white robber barons and industrial giants, there was a Black upper class.

This season, Fellowes and his co-writer Sonja Warfield have taken Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), the young, ambitious Black secretary to Baranski’s dowager Agnes van Rhijn, down South to the newly opened Black Tuskegee University in Alabama.

“We are in 1884 and Sonia and I were advised that the Tuskegee University was open at this most unpropitious time with this extraordinary chapter in the middle of the South, which was very different from the North,” Fellowes said.

“Also, it was getting worse with the un-picking of the freedom — of the voting and rights. The unpicking went on for years, right into the middle of the 20th century.

“But in the middle of this was this college to open young Black men’s horizons. It seems extraordinary – and to do it there. We felt that was historical material worth mining.

“In the first series,” Fellowes noted, “we surprised people with the Black elite — and that is true! They did exist and that was a surprise for a lot of people.

“Now we felt to show the world in context, a whole chunk of racism and horror was going on simultaneously — and that’s what the Tuskegee story gave us to illustrate with Peggy.”

“Peggy,” Warfield pointed out, “has only known the North and her mother really has to give her a harsh warning” about the daily danger of going into this hostile landscape for any Black person.

“In conceiving that scene, my dad was the same age of Emmett Till” – who was 14 when he was tortured and murdered on a visit to the South in 1955 – “and although my dad was born in the North, his father was from the South.

“And that warning her mother gives Peggy was what my father heard.  So I was drawing from my family’s story.”

“The Gilded Age,” Season 2 begins Sunday on HBO MAX.