Meryl Streep's Daughter Stars in a Show Critics Love to Hate

HBO's The Gilded Age has lumbered into its fourth season with the confidence of a drama that has somehow accumulated Emmy recognition despite near-universal critical derision. The show's continued existence places one very particular Hollywood legend — Meryl Streep — in the inescapably awkward role of proud mother to one of its central cast members.

A Dynasty Drama That Critics Cannot Quit Criticizing

Julian Fellowes, the architect behind Downton Abbey's long and profitable run, has replanted his period-drama sensibility in Gilded Age New York, yet the results have drawn consistently skeptical notices. According to The Guardian Culture, the fourth season opens with a barrage of clichés so densely packed that they arrive almost as self-parody: a mustachioed doctor galloping to a crisis, a birth scene scored with screams, and dialogue that circles back to explain what viewers have just watched onscreen. The review's verdict is characteristically blunt — "uniformly terrible and likely to outlive us all."

Yet here it stands, entering its fourth season on HBO in the United States and Sky Atlantic in the United Kingdom, with a cast stacked with genuinely talented performers navigating material that appears to resist them at every turn. Christine Baranski, Carrie Coon, Cynthia Nixon, and Phylicia Rashad are among those striving to dignify a script that reportedly has a maid misidentify bleeding as bleeding.

Louisa Jacobson and the Streep Factor

The element that lends the whole enterprise an extra layer of cultural intrigue is the presence of Louisa Jacobson, Meryl Streep's daughter, in the recurring role of Marian Brook. Jacobson, who trained seriously at the Yale School of Drama, is by all accounts a skilled stage actress — which makes her continued involvement in a show that critics treat as a cautionary tale something of a conversation piece.

Streep herself is, of course, one of the most decorated and analytically celebrated film performers in the history of American cinema. Her body of work — spanning everything from Kramer vs. Kramer to Sophie's Choice to her more recent projects, including a thriller that was ultimately scrapped before release — represents a kind of master class in disciplined, transformative screen acting. The implicit contrast between that legacy and what The Gilded Age offers its cast is not lost on reviewers, who have taken to imagining holiday dinners at the Streep household with something approaching sympathy.

The Emmy Question

Perhaps the most genuinely puzzling dimension of The Gilded Age's persistence is its awards traction. The show has accumulated Emmy recognition in a television landscape crowded with craft-forward prestige drama, prompting the kind of institutional head-scratching that occasionally reveals how disconnected awards bodies can be from critical reception. It is a phenomenon not entirely unlike watching a middling studio film collect technical nominations while genuinely ambitious work goes unacknowledged.

For context, Streep has remained one of Hollywood's most closely watched figures in recent months. Audiences following her career have tracked everything from her involvement in a Devil Wears Prada sequel charity initiative to her reunion with Emily Blunt for a related cause, and speculation around her potential role in Greta Gerwig's Narnia adaptation has generated considerable enthusiasm. Each of those projects, whether realized or rumored, carries a pedigree entirely at odds with the baroque absurdity critics have catalogued in The Gilded Age.

What Season Four Holds

The new season, per early reviews, delivers precisely what returning viewers will expect: labyrinthine financial subplots, an impending visit from President Grover Cleveland, a marriage of convenience involving a gay character, and the continued travails of an Irish maid whose accent has not improved over three prior seasons. Whether the show's audience — and it clearly has one — will eventually demand resolution or simply embrace the perpetual-motion quality of Fellowes' storytelling remains to be seen.

For Meryl Streep, the kindest interpretation may be the most obvious one: she raised a daughter determined enough to work steadily in a demanding industry, on a show the critics hate and audiences keep watching. There are stranger legacies.