There’s ample gold leaf in Season 2 of Julian Fellowes’ “The Gilded Age,” miles of flashy yardage, a flock of feathered hats and swoon-worthy Fifth Avenue ballrooms. For many viewers, this visual candy will be more than enough to soothe the hunger left in the wake of the creator’s massive British hit “Downton Abbey.”
The design porn bounty continues in this HBO period drama that zeroes in on the villas of East 61st Street, setting the scene for conflicts between industrial progress and the horse-drawn carriage, capital and labor, upstairs and downstairs, old money and the nouveau riche, Black and white, men and women and, most pungently, women and women.