Vanity Fair: It really feels like season three is when the show broke containment, reaching beyond its original audience of theater-loving, history-l
Vanity Fair: It really feels like season three is when the show broke containment, reaching beyond its original audience of theater-loving, history-loving people. What do you think it was about this most recent season that struck a chord with a larger audience?
Morgan Spector: To be forthright, you have to commit to shows these days in order to find an audience. There is so much stuff that people say to themselves, I’ll get to that eventually. And by the time they get to it, it’s gone. It’s been canceled because they didn’t get to it, or if it’s a movie, it’s not in the theater anymore and their box office wasn’t good enough ’cause you didn’t go. For studios and networks, they really have to give things some breathing space to find an audience.
So that’s one thing. But also, I think season three was thrilling. Season three, narratively, had a lot going on. Yes, you’re getting your snide remarks, and yes, you’re getting micro-moments that resonate in a way that they wouldn’t necessarily in our contemporary lives. But you’re also getting actual big-time drama. And I think that combination was fun and that brought in more people.
Carrie Coon: I will say, too, it’s a cross-generational show. I meet so many moms and daughters who watch it together, people who watch it with their grandparents. If you want to engage with the seeds of where we are now, you can. And if you just wanna not think about that part and just look at costumes, you can. It can either inspire you to get curious about New York and the history behind the Gilded Age, or you can just really enjoy some costumes and melodrama.
In many ways, we’re in a second Gilded Age period now, where the robber barons of yesteryear have been replaced by tech autocrats. Do you think that’s part of the reason that the show has really struck a chord with viewers?
Spector: I think it’s just structural resonance, right? It’s two periods of alarming inequality. I don’t think the show is necessarily setting out to investigate that. This is the era of Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives. This is the era of people really waking up to what tenement life was like. We’ve dipped into that a diminutive bit, but that’s not really where this show’s interests lie. The resonance between today and then is so exact that it’s unavoidable. So the show ends up having this subversive, trenchant wit about it in the way that it sort of juxtaposes these two time periods.
Coon: That’s what art can do when it’s reflecting the world back to you in that way, but with some artful distance.
Obviously, it’s historical fiction, but there’s a lot of real stuff in there. Now that you’re on your fourth season, are you still learning things about this time period?
Spector: For me, it’s the business stuff: how these guys were making money and how they were trying to get over on one another. That part of it is always fascinating, ’cause these guys were innovating in completely unregulated areas. It’s much like AI, right? I’m sure in 50 years we’re gonna look back and think, How did we ever allow them to be unregulated given all the harms that they could do? There’s a tremendous amount of financial chicanery that goes on in 2026. But back then, there were just no guardrails, so these guys could be wildly inventive. They succeeded in crashing the economy several times, sort of single-handedly. It was a wild time.
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