The Gilded Age can survive its exits, if HBO stops counting names

Is The Gilded Age a show about people, or a show about a handful of famous people? Season 4 is about to answer that question whether HBO likes it or not.

The new season arrives with a pair of notable exits. As Screen Rant reports, citing Deadline, Patrick Page (George Russell's ruthless secretary, Richard Clay) and Sullivan Jones (T. Thomas Fortune, Peggy's former editor and love interest) won't appear in Season 4. Both had been there since Season 1. The eight-episode season, set in 1886, premieres Sunday, November 1 on HBO and HBO Max.

The exits hurt where the plot is, not where the posters are

Here's the uncomfortable part. Page's Clay was a prime suspect in the shooting of George Russell, so his absence leaves the "Who Shot George Russell?" thread in an awkward spot. Fortune, meanwhile, became the jilted lover when Peggy began seeing her now-fiancé, Dr. William Kirkland. These aren't marquee names, but in our view they are narrative load-bearing walls.

That's our first point: ensemble shows don't die when a lead leaves, they wobble when the connective tissue goes. The mystery needs an answer, and the Peggy storyline needs to explain, in a line or two, why a former love interest simply vanished. Screen Rant's own guess is that Fortune "must have accepted defeat" in the time between seasons. That's a shrug, and we think viewers will accept a shrug exactly once.

The show's center of gravity is still intact

The people who actually define this series are still here. The logline puts Bertha (Carrie Coon) and Agnes (Christine Baranski) front and center, with Marian (Louisa Jacobson) and Peggy (Denée Benton) on their own arcs. Morgan Spector's George is still in the picture, and so are Cynthia Nixon, Harry Richardson and Taissa Farmiga. Deadline's red carpet gallery for the New York premiere lists a Season 4 cast of dozens, including Broadway names like Audra McDonald and Kelli O'Hara, plus a long roster of additions: Jim Gaffigan as President Grover Cleveland, Dennis Haysbert, Elizabeth Marvel, Adrienne Warren.

That's the evidence for our thesis. A show with this many regulars looks designed to absorb departures. Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, built it with that same upstairs-and-downstairs structure, and that structure is basically a machine for rotating faces. The worry that this is a vehicle for a few names is, in our view, overstated. The Russell–van Rhijn rivalry is the engine, and it's running.

Treat it as a reset, and use the new faces well

Where HBO can win is by being deliberate. Season 3 ended with the Russells splitting up, Larry and Marian reuniting, Peggy engaged to Dr. William Kirkland, and Ada holding the purse strings, as Collider's recap lays out. That is a lot of fresh pieces on the board. Clearing out old subplots makes room for them.

The risk is the opposite temptation: stuffing the season with guest stars (a sitting president included) and treating them as event casting rather than story. A famous face at Agnes's dinner table is fun for one episode. It doesn't replace a character you've followed for three seasons. We'd rather see the show spend its screen time deepening Peggy, whose arc, according to director Salli Richardson-Whitfield, ends the season with her given an important role in history, than chase cameos.

Our verdict

Two exits are a stress test, not a death sentence. The Gilded Age has the format, the central rivalry and a deep bench to pass it, provided the writers close the loose threads instead of hand-waving them. If the Clay mystery gets a real answer in the first few episodes, we'll believe the reset is intentional. If it gets dropped quietly, that's when the doubts about an ensemble in name only would be fair.

Our advice: start watching on November 1 with patience for the first two episodes. The finale is December 20, per Collider, which gives the show eight episodes to prove the ensemble was the star all along.