With season three of The Gilded Age , actress Deneé Benton turns Peggy Scott into the kind of role actors wait a career to meet. You can feel the calibration: the hush before a choice, the clean torque of a revelation, the stamina of grief rendered without melodrama. It’s the work of someone who knows exactly where her instrument can go and trusts the camera to stay long enough to capture it.

The show’s audience ballooned this year; suddenly, a character who once felt like a cherished secret among diehards was the entry point for millions. Benton frames that surge plainly: It’s rare “air” to play a beautifully written part on prestige television and rarer still when that part is expressly scripted for a Black woman who must move through a social world designed to erase her. Peggy isn’t

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