George Russell

George Russell is a railroad baron building an empire on the edge of old New York society, which refuses to have him. He is ferociously competent, unsentimental about enemies, and entirely devoted to his wife's social ambitions and his children's happiness, even as he crushes rivals without a flicker of guilt in the boardroom.

Spector plays him as a man who has already won every fight that matters to him except the one his wife cares about, and his amusement at that fight is the joke. The writing lets him be genuinely tender at home and genuinely merciless at work without treating either as a mask, which makes him the rare robber baron you root for.