The Worst Show on Television Is Back on HBO. I Can’t Wait to Watch It All.

After an agonizingly long wait, TV’s most disappointing show returns to our screens this week—and I, like so many fellow victims of Julian Fellowes–induced Stockholm syndrome, couldn’t be happier.

That’s right: The Gilded Age, HBO’s glittering period drama that looks as if it cost as much to make as an Upper East Side mansion, is back for a second season more than 18 months after its debut left me and countless others interminably bored. The first season of the series, which promised to be an even more extravagant version of Fellowes’ masterpiece Downton Abbey—only this time chronicling the lives of the uber-rich (and their servants) in 1880s New York City, rather than post-Edwardian England—should have been a slam-dunk. With a stacked cast that felt like a gay man’s fever dream—Carrie Coon! Christine Baranski! Cynthia Nixon! Audra McDonald! Nathan Lane! Jeanne Tripplehorn! Debra Monk! Donna Murphy! Celia Keenan-Bolger!—The Gilded Age was supposed to be a juicy soap opera about the fierce battle between New York’s old money and its new. But to call it a soap opera would be to suggest that something—anything—happened. It was, to put it rudely, a total snooze. (Emmy voters evidently agreed with this assessment, largely snubbing the series save for a singular nomination for production design.)

So why am I so excited for the show’s return?

Well, yes, my homosexual proclivities mean that, regardless of the quality of the show, I am obliged to tune in weekly to watch a suite of Tony Award–winning actresses don fancy gowns and mutter catty lines at one another. I find it impossible to resist the lure of “actresses actressing.” (To quote Reese Witherspoon, women’s stories matter. They just matter.)

But truthfully, there was also something oddly marvelous to behold in watching HBO’s evidently substantial budget get flushed down the toilet of something so tedious. This was a series in which some of the high points, such as they were, included a lavish party with low attendance, the invention of the lightbulb, and a French chef revealing himself to actually hail from Kansas. Yawn! What’s more, it felt like an immense waste of talent, with the show making criminal underuse of Baranski and its cast of Broadway royalty in favor of the penniless niece Marian Brook, played by an actress (Louisa Jacobson, daughter of Meryl Streep) who simply wasn’t capable of carrying half a show on her shoulders. (The other half was carried, with admirable effort, by Coon.) The gulf between what The Gilded Age imagined it was (a riveting, luxurious, epic, scandalous, and important piece of prestige television) and what it turned out to be (a meandering, small, plot-starved, confused, and self-important show featuring a bunch of characters whose names I never learned) was fascinating, as if I were watching a horse-and-buggy crash in slow motion. It was camp. Boring, but camp.

The result was perversely intoxicating, best summed up by my reaction when the promotional poster heralding the show’s second season—an appropriately boring pastiche featuring all but two characters looking off camera, as if searching for something more interesting—was released earlier this month. “Worst show on television,” I wrote on X, the site formerly and still known as Twitter. “Can’t wait to watch it all.”

Turns out I wasn’t alone in my love-hate relationship. Others chimed in with similar sentiments: “Never been more bored in my life. Gonna watch every episode each week.” “So boring. I was glued to the TV.” “I will be seated. I’ll be bored, but nonetheless I will be seated.”

“TV is back!!!!!!! Who will cross the street this season?????” tweeted writer Rose Dommu, referencing a Season 1 climax in which Baranski … crossed a street. (You had to be there).

I fully expected another season of storylines moving at the speed of a glacier, but having been treated to screeners for this new season, I can gleefully reveal a plot twist I never saw coming: The show is suddenly … good? My joy in The Gilded Age’s return no longer springs merely from some TV form of schadenfreude. There are actual plots now! Fast-moving plots—with real consequences! And twists! The power dynamics between characters have changed, blessing us at long last with some meaty feuds and villains over which to obsess! And people are finally doing some capital-A acting!

Oh, yes, my Gilded girlies. We are so back.

Season 2 immediately lives up to its standing reputation as a low-stakes series featuring an untold number of bows, opening with a montage of—what else?—pretty hats! But the show quickly becomes slyly self-referential, and you soon get the sense that Fellowes has listened to and learned from criticisms of the first season. As Baranski’s and Nixon’s characters walk to an Easter Sunday church service, Nixon’s Ada asks her on-screen sister, “Are you sure this isn’t too much for you?” Baranski’s Agnes is no longer imprisoned in her fusty drawing room for five straight episodes—she goes outside twice in the season premiere, practically tying her first-season tally in just one episode. What a thrill!

Without giving away too much, most of this season revolves around a so-called opera war between the old-money fans of the elitist Academy of Music and their new-money rivals rallying behind the soon-to-be-opened Metropolitan Opera, which promises to be slightly less elitist. If that sounds dull, let me assure you that never has a competition over an opera box felt more exciting. Coon’s Bertha Russell is finally given some worthy opponents in Murphy’s Mrs. Astor, as well as an old friend whose surprise return made me genuinely gasp.

Jacobson’s character isn’t sidelined, but she isn’t required to carry the show as she once was, given that other characters are now, smartly, more prominently featured. This lessened burden is evidently to Jacobson’s benefit because her performance is streets ahead of her first-season showing. Mother Streep would be proud.

Moreover, the plots move this season. There are weddings, deaths, naked couples rolling around in bed, May–December romances, screaming matches—sometimes all within just a few episodes! The show also expands its purview, featuring more of the lives of the working poor—the people making these rich folk so rich—and taking viewers to the South on a reporting trip with Peggy (Denée Benton). We also get fun 19^th-century cameos from Oscar Wilde, Brooklyn Bridge engineer Emily Roebling, and Booker T. Washington.

Truthfully, I think a lot of my enjoyment of this season came from watching the episodes all in one go, rather than waiting for HBO to dole out measly crumbs on a weekly schedule. As much as I liked turning my brain off each week and letting the world of The Gilded Age wash over me last year, this is the kind of show that benefits from the model of binge-watching, preferably with as much wine as you can stomach. It makes the storylines feel faster and more important, two qualities that the series was desperately lacking.

That’s not to say that The Gilded Age is going to be crowned the new Succession anytime soon. The show still falls into some lazy writing clichés—one character making a dramatic late-wedding entrance, and another destined for death after showing the faintest signs of illness—that feel standard of any soap opera. But the fact that I am now comfortable declaring that the series is a soap opera, and a rather marvelous one at that, is a testament to how far it has come: from a show that I loved to hate-watch, to one that I now love with only the slightest trace of irony. If you need any more convincing, well, while watching one new episode, when the music swelled during a particularly intense moment that involved the serving of a bowl of soup, I found myself on the edge of my seat. What other television can promise that?