Julian Fellowes' 'The Gilded Age' Moves House From NBC to HBO

The long saga of period dramaThe Gilded Age continues. Originally sold to NBC in 2012, in the wake of Downton Abbey's massive success in the states, creator Julian Fellowes' intended follow-up series was said to be set a generation earlier, in New York City, focusing on the stories of those like the Duchess of Grantham, Cora Crowley. As the daughters of new money industrialists in America, many women set their caps for old world titles in Europe, aiming to bring respectability to their nouveau riche families. It took six years of development, but finally, in January of 2018, NBC Entertainment president Bob Greenblatt declared the project ready to move forward, and NBC announced it as picked up to series, though to date no casting has been done, and no premiere date announced.

While all this was going on, things were changing in the media landscape. In October of 2016, AT&T attempted a takeover of TimeWarner, home of HBO. It took a couple of years and overcoming a few hurdles thrown up by the Trump administration who wanted to stick it to Time Warner's CNN, but last summer, the deal was finally completed. As a result, this led to a massive amount of turnover at HBO's upper levels. And, as part of this shift, Greenblatt is leaving NBC to oversee content at WarnerMedia, and he's taking The Gilded Age with him.

This is not entirely unheard of, but it is rare enough to cause a few eyebrows to raise. The last time it happened was when Greenblatt left Showtime in 2011 to move to NBC and took with him a little Broadway-style prestige show the channel was developing called Smash. Smash didn't do so well moving from a small-order prestige series to broadcast, and, by the time it ended, was an emblem of shows viewers watch to hate. The Gilded Age, on the other hand, may benefit highly from moving house from a lower-budget longer-season broadcast to the higher-end echelons of premium cable.