Status comes in many forms, but the quickest shorthand for status on TV is wealth. The clothes. The real estate. The private jets and other markers of affluence. Early in the Amazon series “We Were Liars,” a family convenes at their sprawling beachfront estate on a private island near Martha’s Vineyard and, like numerous wealthaganda shows of the moment — “The Perfect Couple,” “Sirens” and “The Better Sister,” among many — this version of luxury is East Coast old money. So much so, it might as well be an ad for Ralph Lauren come to life, a sensation that becomes even weirder when Ralph Lauren is indeed namechecked in the script.

Wealthy people — their absurdities and their pains, their endless wants and needs and human foibles — have dominated streaming’s output over the last several years. Even so-called satirical depictions manage only the thinnest of critiques, while ensuring that characters who could mount a meaningful challenge to the status quo remain firmly off screen. The central players are miserable or odious, but even so, we’re meant to want this life because look at the glorious trappings! Surely we wouldn’t be unhappy if we had this lifestyle at our disposal. We’re being seduced into a world largely stripped of color in terms of the interior design, but also the people who inhabit these spaces. It’s a portrait disconnected from the lives of most Americans and where we are, existentially, as a country.

It’s a genre filled with status markers selling us on certain ideas, says Dominique J. Baker. A professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, she studies the real-world effects of status, and we talked about recent TV offerings that reflect — or shape — our notions of status.

QYou’ve dubbed these “Nicole Kidman gauzy wealth shows” — quiet luxury manifested as television — because Kidman has become the face of this trend, and it’s such an apt description, capturing how they reinforce notions of what status is supposed to look like. There are all kinds of sources of wealth in this country, but the big, fast and blatantly destructive money at the moment is from Silicon Valley. That’s not the version of status we’re being shown on our screens.

A Right, we’re being fed Cape Cod, the Vineyard. And that’s because, for example, if you’re lusting for the tradwife life, you’re not lusting for Silicon Valley. I would argue that when we think about East Coast money, regardless of how the money was obtained, we think of it as Old Money — people who’ve had wealth for generations — and we imbue that with a goodness that we don’t with Silicon Valley.

QWith a show like “Succession” or “The White Lotus,” their money and status insulate them from consequences, which is probably true enough in real life. But the characters are insulated from narrative consequences in these fictional depictions. These stories aren’t interested in anything that pushes back on how the wealthy operate and exist.

A We understand how the world works, right? Yes, having money means you can avoid certain consequences. But if you have a narrative aim with your fictional work, it doesn’t make sense for there to be no consequences. Conversely, one of my favorite TV shows is the Bravo reality series “Below Deck,” which is about the staff manning these yachts. The stars of the show are the workers who haul out the jet skis and clean the bathrooms and unpack your suitcase. And frequently, the rich people do get comeuppance, even if it’s only for five minutes. They often go on the show and think they can treat the workers like trash and no one will ever know, which is ridiculous because the camera is right there. But because our point of view into the story is from the workers’ perspective, the workers get the last word. They get to say, “Oh, that lady was a ‘beep’ and a ‘beep’ and left her garbage all over the place.” And that woman has no idea, until six months later, that everybody sees her for who she is and it’s on national TV.

Q These are contemporary portrayals, whereas “The Gilded Age” takes place in the late 19th century. The title is borrowed from an actual satirical novel from 1873 by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that took aim at the era’s greed, corruption and the emptiness of materialism. Commentary around the show tends to frame it as fun and frothy, because it’s clearly not aiming for meaningful critique. It’s conspicuous but also surreal to see the original robber barons — the villains of history! — reimagined on TV as endearing or sympathetic at the exact moment we’re living through a devastating revival of the robber baron era in real life.

AIt irks me that we’re meant to root for the characters played by Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector, who are stand-ins for the Vanderbilts and are positioned against the ridiculous snobbery of the Old Money families who want to keep them out of their society circles. We’re meant to think they’re scrappy upstarts and how unfair it is that these other rich people don’t like them because they’re New Money, so we should root for them. That’s bananas.