How ‘The Gilded Age,’ ‘Feud’ and More Period Dramas Walk a Fine Line Between Being Accurate and Offensive With Language (2024)

The art of making a quality period drama isn’t just about ensuring authentic representation of how people of a bygone era would look, move, live and work. It’s also about nailing what they would say and how they would say it — but in a way that doesn’t make today’s audience rush for a dictionary.

“I try to give some words and language and phrases that they would have used but I also try not to use phrases that would distract a modern audience,” says Julian Fellowes, who created HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” about New York’s late-19th century social scene.

Fellowes, who works on the show with writer and co-executive producer Sonja Warfield, says that, consequently, the audience is “prepared to go on this journey with us.” And that may mean hearng outdated viewpoints and language that may be considered offensive.

“I think it’s a mistake — because you want them to be sympathetic— to give characters modern attitudes,” he says. “What you want to find is the attitudes of people who, within their own period, would have been considered reasonably progressive.”

At the same time, he says, “I think it’s perfectly possible to depict a character as unpleasant or unjust without using offensive language. You can achieve the dramatic purpose without offending and making everyone uncomfortable. We didn’t try to falsify or pretend we were living in a happy period where nobody had an unkind thought. But we, I hope, managed to make that clear dramatically.”

Warfield says the show’s writers made a “conscious choice not to use a racial slur” in the powerful second season episode, “Close Enough to Touch.” That episode found Denée Benton’s writer Peggy Scott — a Black woman born free in the north and raised in New York — in the American South for the first time. She and her editor T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) must flee a mob of angry white men in Tuskegee, Ala.

“I think that would be discordant to the way that our show normally sounds,” Warfield says of the dialogue choice. “It would become about the word … We didn’t want to remove the suspension of disbelief for the viewer.”

The second season of “Gilded Age” also focuses on Blake Ritson’s Oscar van Rhijn, the wealthy son of Christine Baranski’s old-monied socialite, Agnes; he also happens to be in the closet. Fellowes says showing Oscar to be badly beaten after an encounter during the second season’s premiere, “You Don’t Even Like Opera,” is a reminder of just how dangerous it was (and is) to be queer in this country.
“Being gay was illegal into the 1960s,” he points out. “It all had to be covered up and it was really difficult. Of course, as a writer, I could say the advantage of that is any gay story you put” into a series allows you to push back on those outdated views.

Callous language was used in the FX miniseries “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” both to reflect hom*ophobia and bigotry simmering underneath the surface of that time and setting and, because it’s based on true events, reflects the actual conversations that happened.

Set mostly in mid-century New York and centering on the lives of author Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) and society women, era-specific hom*ophobia and bigotry is seemingly always under the surface. When Demi Moore’s furious Ann Woodward uses a derogatory word, it packs a punch.

Series executive producer Ryan Murphy told Variety during a press conference for the show that there was much talk in the writers’ room about the word and “how it was depicted on the show.”

“As difficult as it was to articulate, [it was about] being true to the characters and the time and the power of words,” Murphy said. “We researched that quite heavily and we had a lot of conversations about ‘should we leave it in? Should we take it out?’ Ultimately the show left it in, Murphy notes, but as a gay person who has heard that word used “since I was 3 years old, I really understand the wound of it and the pain of it and how it really can turn your life upside down.”

This also speaks to how quickly language can evolve.

FX didn’t expect that all of “Shōgun” viewers would be hip to the terminology and history of feudal Japan. So they put together an extensive online guide that includes a glossary of terms like “rōnin” (masterless samurai), “bushō” (warlord) and “sokush*tsu” (concubine), as well as a map and historical timeline. But Max’s crime drama “Tokyo Vice” had to concentrate on how that language would have changed during a more recent time, as it jumped from its 1990s-set first season to the early 2000s of Season 2. Creator J. T. Rogers and the writers researched the type of slang yakuza members would have used at the time, as well as how a white American who learned Japanese in a formal setting (Ansel Elgort’s journalist Jake Adelstein) would sound when speaking it in comparison to one who is self-taught (Rachel Keller’s Samantha Porter).

“The New Look” creator Todd A. Kessler had a more complicated problem when making his Apple TV+ series about fashion designers Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn), Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) and others in France during and after World War II — French libel and slander laws.

Because he filmed in France, everything said by his characters had to be double-verified by a French lawyer — including how extensive Chanel’s ties were to the Nazi party. Although Binoche’s Chanel shares many antisemitic sentiments, she’s not heard using any derogatory slurs because Kessler says he couldn’t find any references to her doing so in his research.

The show is in English largely because Kessler wanted to work with Mendelsohn again after their successful partnership on Netflix’s “Bloodline.” The Australian actor received a supporting actor in a drama Emmy and two other nominations for the family-focused crime thriller. But he does not speak French.

Still, Kessler says, he wanted the show “to use English in a way that feels a little bit more formal” and stay away from slang or pejorative.

There’s at least one line that was verifiable that Kessler would love to have written. The French actress Arletty (portrayed here by Joséphine de La Baume) was said to have had a relationship with a German officer during the occupation.

Her response to the accusations? “My heart is French, but my ass is international.”