Somewhere above the Atlantic, a Gulfstream is probably being diverted right now because someone just watched the new trailer for Old Money Season 2 and realized their own family lawyer might be on the Davenport payroll.
At 9:00 a.m. sharp, HBO Max dropped two minutes and forty seconds of pure, uncut chaos, and the sound you heard around the world was a thousand trust-fund hearts skipping a collective beat. The screen fades in on the oak-paneled library of Highmere, that 120-room Hudson Valley fortress on the Hudson where the Davenports have buried secrets deeper than their wine cellar for two centuries, and a white-gloved attorney is reading Archibald Davenport IV’s last will and testament in a voice that trembles more with each paragraph. The old man, dead six weeks from what the coroner generously called “natural causes,” has disinherited every child, every grandchild, every cousin twice removed, and left the entire forty-two-billion-dollar empire to a charitable trust no one has ever heard of. The camera lingers on the signature at the bottom of the page, ink still suspiciously wet, the loops in the “A” shaking like a man signing under duress, and then Emily Davenport’s voice, low and lethal and unmistakable, slices through the stunned silence: “Someone in this room forged it. Someone knows where the real ledger is. And someone is willing to kill again to keep both secrets buried.”
From that moment the trailer becomes a fever dream of money on fire. A 1926 Baccarat decanter explodes against Italian marble while Victoria Davenport, still devastating at sixty-two, pours a bottle of 1945 Château d’Yquem straight down the drain and murmurs, “In this family we don’t get divorces, darling; we get alibis.” Uncle Alistair, the black-sheep brother who was banished thirty years ago for reasons no one will speak aloud, strolls back through the front doors wearing a smile sharp enough to cut glass and holding a tiny crystal vial that catches the chandelier light like liquid starlight. Julian Haverford, the journalist who stole Emily’s heart and half the audience’s sanity last season, appears in silver handcuffs being marched across the winter lawn by federal agents, shouting her name while she watches from an upstairs window like a Renaissance painting coming to life and choosing destruction. And then there is the ledger itself, that mythic leather-bound tome begun in 1898, passed hand to hand at a black-tie auction while a string quartet saws through “Lacrimosa” as if the world really is ending, until it vanishes into a wall safe hidden behind the oil portrait of the founding robber baron who started it all.
The accusations come so fast they feel like whiplash. Victoria hisses that Emily forged the will to protect the man she loves. Alistair produces a toxicology report suggesting Archie was poisoned with something slow and elegant and untraceable. A Parisian art authenticator with Davenport cheekbones and a French accent sharp enough to open veins announces she has DNA proof she is Archie’s secret daughter from a lost weekend in Cannes. And in the cruelest cut of all, grainy security footage shows Emily herself in the library at 3:14 a.m. the night before her grandfather died, holding what looks very much like the original will… and touching a flame to its corner while the smoke curls up like a confession.
The final thirty seconds are merciless. Emily stands alone on Highmere’s widow’s walk in a storm that feels biblical, black cape snapping around her like raven wings, screaming into a satellite phone, “I don’t care if it costs me love or legacy; I’m keeping both,” before the screen cuts to black and the release date burns across it in blood-red letters: April 19, 2026. A post-credits sting, because HBO knows exactly what it’s doing, shows a gloved hand sliding the missing ledger into the wall safe while a voice that could belong to anyone whispers, “The game isn’t over. It’s only just begun.”
Season 1 was already the most expensive series HBO Max had ever made, shot in actual Gilded Age palaces, dressed in couture that cost more per episode than most people’s houses, soundtracked by a Lana Del Rey needle-drop that broke Shazam. But Season 2 has doubled every number that matters: twelve episodes instead of ten, a quarter-billion-dollar budget, cameos from real billionaires who signed NDAs thicker than their prenups, and a marketing campaign so subtle it feels like blackmail. Critics who spent last year calling it “Succession with better cheekbones and actual sex” are already rewriting their superlatives; one test-screening quote leaked to Variety simply reads, “I need a safe word for television.”
The internet, predictably, has lost its mind in the most expensive way possible. Private-group chats among actual old-money families are suddenly very quiet. TikTok is flooded with “Get Ready With Me to Commit Light Forgery” videos set to the trailer’s heartbeat bassline. Someone has already turned the line “we get alibis” into a ringtone that is climbing the iTunes charts. And in the Hamptons, one heiress allegedly told her lawyer to have her father’s will witnessed by three Supreme Court justices and a Vatican notary “because you never know anymore.”
Old Money has never been just a guilty pleasure. It has always been a mirror polished with venom, held up to the people who believe wealth makes them untouchable, and Season 2 is about to shatter that mirror into a million razor-sharp pieces. When Emily Davenport stands on that widow’s walk and declares war on her own blood, she isn’t just fighting for billions; she’s fighting for the right to decide what kind of monster her legacy turns her into.
April 19, 2026, feels impossibly far away and terrifyingly close all at once. Until then, re-watch Season 1 with the lights on, memorize every frame of this trailer like it’s evidence in your own trial, and maybe, just maybe, double-check the locks on your own safe.
Because after today, no inheritance feels safe anymore. And in the world of old money, the only thing more dangerous than losing everything… is finding out someone you love might be the one who took it.
Old Money Season 2 premieres April 19, 2026, exclusively on HBO Max. Bring your lawyer. Bring your lover. Bring whatever’s left of your soul. You’re going to need it.
