“Julia,” which ran for three seasons starting in 1968, was about a Black registered nurse, played by Diahann Carroll in her signature unflappable style. Her character was a professional woman, a single mom of an adorable son and the widow of a Vietnam War veteran, who negotiated a white world in which she occasionally encountered prejudice and dispatched it with crisp dismissal. (Though, it should be noted, many episodes dealt with other issues entirely.) To the N.A.A.C.P. of the late 1950s, “Julia” would’ve been just the ticket, portraying a financially independent, self-assured Black everywoman.But as Donald Bogle documents in “Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television,” Carroll recalled that Harry Belafonte, the actor and civil rights activist, “launched a full-scale assault on ‘Julia,’ then asked me not to do it.” Bogle notes that Robert Lewis Shayon, a TV critic for The Saturday Review, wrote that the sitcom’s middle-class setting was “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.” After Carroll responded to Shayon’s criticism by noting that for many, watching TV can be a form of escapism at the end of a typical trying day, Shayon later wrote that the show:distorts reality and deals in double-truth. The business of TV comedy is not primarily to make people laugh: it is to manage consumption; and if in so doing it dulls critical sensibilities in people who have ‘had a pretty grim day,’ it contributes its share to the rigidity of a way of life in which black Americans suffer more severely than others.Shayon was white and his take on a show about middle-class Black contentment was what we might now call woke, in some ways more intuitive to many than the N.A.A.C.P.’s response to “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”Which brings me to the way race is handled on the new HBO Max show, “The Gilded Age.” As Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times reports, the creator, Julian Fellowes (of “Downton Abbey” fame), considered having the show’s central Black female character, Peggy Scott, played by Denée Benton, be introduced to other characters as a maid. This would have been an honest depiction of some Black people’s station amid wealthy white New Yorkers in 1882, but an incomplete one. Benton requested that the creators consider a different conception of her character, and they did — Peggy starts out as the personal secretary to Agnes Van Rhijn, the society matron played by Christine Baranski. And as the show proceeds, we learn that for Peggy, an aspiring writer, a secretarial position is something of a step down, as she eschews the ready-made path that her parents want for her: taking over her father’s pharmacy and her prescribed place in Black society.Miracle of miracles, “The Gilded Age” is portraying in living color (at least through the show’s most recently released episode) Brooklyn’s Black bourgeoisie of the era, and some of its history. That is, many Black New Yorkers, terrorized by the 1863 Draft Riots — which included the torching of a Black orphanage on Fifth Avenue — and by the generally oppressive conditions for Black people in an openly bigoted Manhattan, moved across the East River to Brooklyn, where a community of prosperous Black families took hold. Who knew that we would ever see, in high-def, this affluent Black Brooklyn, with characters played by actors as august as Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson? (Of note, also, is one of the show’s executive producers, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, known for her acting roles in movies such as “Antwone Fisher,” who directs four “Gilded Age” episodes this season.)The victory here is the kind that the critics of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” would have saluted, even if the critics of “Julia” might have been more skeptical. That is to say that “The Gilded Age,” at least so far, isn’t reckoning with the 19th-century Black New Yorkers who were making their way in the suffocatingly overcrowded Five Points neighborhood downtown (depicted memorably by Martin Scorsese in “Gangs of New York”). Or in cramped tenements in San Juan Hill on the Upper West Side, where “West Side Story” is set, a neighborhood later demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. In one scene, though, “Gilded Age” does nod to the racial stratification of the time, irrespective of class: As Peggy and her father stand on a sidewalk, white pedestrians pass, and she and her father know that they’re expected to stand aside and make way, and they do — their moneyed status and elegant bearing offering no exemption from being treated as second-class citizens.