‘Downton Abbey’ follow-up set for 2019

“The Gilded Age,” the much-anticipated follow-up from the creator of the British period drama “Downton Abbey,” is to air in 2019 on NBC, the network confirmed on Wednesday. The 10-part series is written by the British screenwriter and director Julian Fellowes, who will also be its executive producer.

The series is set in 1880s New York and will follow the character of Marion Brook during a time of rapid social change, exploring the tension between new money and established wealth.

“To write ‘The Gilded Age’ is the fulfillment of a personal dream,” Fellowes said in a statement. “America is a wonderful country with a rich and varied history, and nothing could give me more pleasure than be the person to bring that compelling history to the screen.”

Plans for “The Gilded Age” were first announced by NBC in 2012, while “Downton Abbey” was still in production. In an interview with The New York Times in 2015, Fellowes said of creating the new show, “I am a big, big fan of Edith Wharton and Henry James and that period of history after the Civil War — the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys and all of those people.”

There have long been trans-Atlantic currents in Fellowes’ work. In “Downton Abbey,” the main character the Earl of Grantham is married to an American heiress. Fellowes wrote the screenplay for the American director Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” a murder mystery set in an English stately home in the 1930s that won the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 2002.

Fellowes’ historical melodrama “Downton Abbey,” which first aired on ITV in Britain in 2010 and on PBS in the United States in 2011, ran for six seasons. It was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, winning 15 Emmys and 69 nominations.

Michael Haneke to create new series

The Oscar-winning Austrian director Michael Haneke is working on a TV series, called “Kelvin’s Book,” the television company FremantleMedia announced Monday.

The 10-part English-language show will be set in a dystopian future and tells the story of a group of young people whose plane is forced to make an emergency landing.

In a news statement, Haneke said, “After 10 TV movies and 12 films, I wanted to tell a longer story for once.”

Haneke’s “Amour,” a French-language film about an aging couple, won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 2012 and the Palme d’Or, the highest accolade at the Cannes Film Festival, the same year. The acclaimed director had previously won the Palme d’Or for his movie “The White Ribbon” in 2009.

Haneke began his filmmaking career in television and made movies for TV in West Germany in the 1970s and ’80s, as well as a two-part miniseries, “Lemmings,” in 1979. In 1997, he adapted Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” for ORF, Austria’s public service broadcaster.

Haneke made his first feature film, “The Seventh Continent,” in 1989. Most of Haneke’s movies are in German and French, although he remade his 1997 German-language film “Funny Games” in English in 2007, and his latest movie, “Happy End,” though primarily in French, featured some dialogue in English.

The production company working on “Kelvin’s Book,” UFA Fiction, was also behind “Deutschland 83”, the German espionage series that aired in 2015.

“No other director of the present has sharpened and stirred up my perception through his films like Michael Haneke,” Nico Hoffman, the UFA Fiction chief executive, said in a statement. “‘Kelvin’s Book’ is an extraordinarily rich, gripping and ambitious story. With contemporary themes and a reflection of the digital age that we live in, there’s no better time for this project.”