What to watch this weekend: Gilded Age costume dramas for every taste on Crave and Apple TV+ | Canada Voices

The Gilded Age, Crave

It’s costume-drama season in full bloom once more – and the small screen overfloweth with young women making their debuts in fancy dresses and dowagers with withering stares and remarks. Set in New York in the 1880s, HBO’s The Gilded Age returns Sunday with social-climbing schemer Mrs. Russell (The White Lotus’s Carrie Coon) trying to keep her daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), away from the average rich guy she loves so she can be matched with a duke coming to town. Meanwhile, Mrs. Forte (And Just Like That…’s Cynthia Nixon) has embraced the temperance movement – adding yet one more source of tension to the household she shares with Mrs. van Rhijn (Christine Baranski, the new plotline hitting her pour-me-a-drink sweet spot). High production values and plenty of plot – but your enjoyment of this Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) show will entirely depend on whether you feel a big emotional scene is undercut or enhanced by a line of dialogue that starts with, “When I bedecked myself in these geegaws.”

The Buccaneers, Apple TV+

Loosely based on a conveniently unfinished Edith Wharton novel, Apple’s own Gilded Age drama – set in England, mind you, and a decade earlier – has returned for a second season. When we last left wealthy American social-climber Nan (Kristine Froseth), she had married a handsome member of the British nobility – but, alas, was in love with another man and only said “I do” to Duke Theo in order to save her sister. Nan’s biological mother was in attendance at the wedding but unseen – and she’s now revealed to be her aunt Nell, played by Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester. The Buccaneers is less concerned with referencing real historical events than The Gilded Age – and contemporary looks seep into its costumes and contemporary music into its soundtrack (the opening theme is, amusingly, LCD Soundsystem’s North American Scum). If you like Bridgerton – and can stomach the goopiest of girl-power feminism – you’ll likely like this almost as much. (I do.)

Outrageous, BritBox

While some of the famed/shameful Mitford girls have cameoed as characters on TV shows such as Peaky Blinders in the past, now the real-life six aristocratic British sisters have their own proper limited series – the first two episodes of which are now on BritBox. Creator Sarah Williams starts the timeline in 1931 with Nancy Mitford (Bessie Carter), a novelist, narrating the story of how so many of her various high-society siblings became avid fascists or Communists. The first episode centring on a sister’s coming-out ball is altogether too stuffy for a show titled Outrageous – but the true tale is compelling and gains momentum after Diana (Joanna Vanderham) and Unity (Shannon Watson) head off to Nuremberg, Germany, to observe one of a certain famous dictator’s rallies first hand. The fashion appeal of fascism is foregrounded – with Joshua Sasse disturbingly sauve as the philandering Oswald Mosley – and the reasons for returning to the Mitford saga now, anew, are clear.

The Stand, Knowledge Network, NFB

Now, immerse yourself in the history of the country we actually live in with this extraordinary NFB doc about a peaceful stand-off between Haida protesters and loggers in Haida Gwaii in 1985. Director Christopher Auchter and editor Sarah Hedar crafted the documentary out of reams of rediscovered footage shot by filmmakers embedded in the camp of activists blocking a road on Lyell Island to stop out-of-control logging. The humanity and humour of the situation is fully captured – and there’s a particularly amazing scene showing the protesters rehearsing the theatrical aspects of their blockade tactics. What astonishes most, aside from the bravery of the elders who were the first of 72 arrested over two weeks, is the tone of respect – between the Haida, standing up for the ecosystem and their then-unacknowledged rights over the archipelago (only fully recognized by the federal government this February, 40 years on), and a roped-into-it RCMP detachment and the hard-working loggers. Eschewing any narration, this a doc as rich and complex in construction as any season of prestige drama. Clips from B.C. journalist Jack Webster’s old call-in show are brilliantly curated to provide a kind of colonial comic relief. Streaming at nfb.ca and knowledge.ca and on their respective apps.

The Survivors, Netflix

For those still itching for more Mare of Easttown, try this twist-filled Australian miniseries – which scratches the right spot, or the general vicinity anyway. Fifteen years after his brother died in an accident trying to save him, Kieran (Charlie Vickers) and his wife, Mia (Yerin Ha), return home to Tasmania to introduce their newborn daughter to his parents. But Kieran’s father suffers from dementia and his mother is still furious about the past – the trauma of which fully returns in this small community after a young woman is murdered. Robyn Malcolm as Kieran’s mother – who blames her surviving son for the loss of her other son – gives a particularly complex and powerful performance, while Catherine McClements is wrenching, too, as the mother of a daughter’s whose loss 15 years earlier was overshadowed by the deaths of male would-be heroes.