If you are afraid of giant, taxidermized animals or prosthetic genitals, you are advised to avoid the set of Comedy Central’s historical sitcom Another Period. Dead, stuffed bears are not for everyone (including one very squeamish journalist) but the presence of corpses contorted into terrifying poses adds to the old-timey ambience of the set – a sprawling mansion perched on a hill on Los Angeles’s east side. Occasionally, you catch a glimpse of the LA skyline and need something to jolt you back into the past.
Another Period, which begins its second season on Wednesday night, is a wry satire of the Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey-style class drama created by comedians Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome. (I had previously met them for a Grantland podcast.) The series transports the genre to the United States, circa the turn of the 20th century, while grafting on elements of our modern fixation with reality TV. It tells the story of the Bellacourts, an old money family in Newport, Rhode Island, that’s consumed with all manner of drama – infidelity, thievery, incest and overall poor behavior.
Leggero and Lindhome portray Lillian and Beatrice Bellacourt – sisters as obsessed with social status as they are ignorant of most everything else in the world. Characters routinely expose their innermost feelings to camera in talking head confessionals similar to the ones on shows like The Bachelor and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In its first season, Another Period developed a reputation for cutting social satire – a tradition that continues in season two.
“We’re focusing on the servants and what the downstairs life is like. It’s just as fascinating as the upstairs to me,” Leggero tells me. “Those are the only characters I like, who are, like, super flawed. Some of my favorite shows, like Arrested Development or Absolutely Fabulous or Eastbound and Down, these people, there’s so much wrong with them.” Her interest in class and social standing has been a major part of her work since her early days as a standup comic and was a major impetus for the development of Another Period. “In comedy, people have a point of view. Some people talk about weed. Some people talk about youth. Some people talk about being a mom. I’ve always just liked class. It’s intriguing, especially in America. I feel very connected to it.”
On the day I arrived on set, Leggero was sick, but plugging through the day. As one of the stars of the series – the odious, narcissistic Lillian Bellacourt – and also a co-showrunner with Lindhome, she can’t feasibly take many days off. She shares creative responsibility with Lindhome, director Jeremy Konner, and her new husband Moshe Kasher, who is also a member of the writing staff. I ask Leggero what it’s like to have a spouse on set and she takes a moment to ponder. “I think we went on our honeymoon during the writer’s room. I don’t understand how I did this. I somehow led the writer’s room with Riki, converted to Judaism, bought a house, planned a wedding, and starred on another TV show (Showtime’s Dice) in a two-week period or three-week period.” Did it affect their relationship on set? “Nothing really changed. He’s very supportive,” she says.
Leggero and Lindhome collectively command a great deal of respect on the set, which doesn’t have loose chuckles and riffing that outsiders might think defines a comedy production. As co-showrunners, their fingerprints are on everything, down to the surreal paintings of the cast that line the walls of the dining room set. “One day, I remember I came in late. Ten o’clock instead of eight, because I wanted to sleep, and they were already done shooting the scene and this little kid has, like, a totally modern hairdo and no one else caught it,” she says, exasperated. “Even something as small as a hairstyle, that’s part of the tone. Not that Jeremy [Konner] wouldn’t catch that, but they have a million other things to do. He has to worry about lights and time and actors and accents. There’s so much that everyone’s working on. As showrunners, we’re the only people who can look in the monitor and kind of know what’s wrong.”
They’ve perfected a working relationship that allows each of them to command certain aspects of the production, recognizing the other’s strength. “Riki is a talented sound designer and wanted to be a foley artist as a child,” Leggero reveals to me. “So, she hears things a little louder than normal. Someone will do a sound pass and I’ll write back, ‘Sounds amazing’ and then Riki will be like, ‘You’re just doing clocks and cuckoo birds in a loop.’ And then I’ll listen again and she’s right. I thought it sounded great. We know each other’s strengths. I’m totally fine leaving her to do the sound and pick the doorbell.”
Their attention to detail and commitment to their craft is probably why Another Period was able to attract one of the most stacked, impressive casts in comedy today: David Koechner, Paget Brewster, Michael Ian Black, Brett Gelman, Brian Huskey, David Wain, Jason Ritter, Beth Dover and Armen Weitzman. Another Period was also one of the first post-Mad Men projects for Christina Hendricks, who plays the duplicitous maid named Chair (you’ll have to watch season one to figure out why she’s called that). Guest stars for this season include Andrew Rannells from HBO’s Girls, Cedric the Entertainer as Scott Joplin and June Diane Raphael as Eleanor Roosevelt. It was the Roosevelt episode that was being shot that day, and Raphael labored over how best to seduce Lindhome’s Beatrice Bellacourt.
“She’s one of those people, we always think of her. She elevates your material. I mean, the material’s pretty good, too. We actually wrote it for Tig [Notaro] because we wanted a real androgynous [person]. But June came in and just made it so hers,” Leggero tells me. Leggero and Lindhome offer suggestions on how best to seduce Beatrice, where exactly Roosevelt should put her hand on her back, and the best line to end the scene.
I was told the season two premiere would feature Harriet Tubman, who teaches the Bellacourt sisters the value of personal branding, a distinctly modern concept. A subsequent episode uses hatchets as a stand-in for our current debate on gun ownership and the second amendment. Another Period cleverly uses history to wade into 21st-century problems in many of its episodes. Before each season is written, Leggero and Lindhome go to the real Newport, Rhode Island, for research.
“We’ve been two, three times. There’s always new things to be inspired by there,” Leggero says. “These places are really just frozen in time. On one tour, we went to the servants’ quarters. So that guests wouldn’t see them when they were coming in, they built a brick wall around the entire third floor. So you look in their rooms and you see this brick wall. Of course, you go out and it’s the most amazing view.”
Lindhome chimes in. “It’s like a garden overlooking the ocean,” she says. “They just didn’t care,” Leggero says with a certain melancholy. “I read this book in Newport and someone was bragging that their gardener came from three generations of gardeners. That’s the world. A gardener that takes pride in his work, and this is what he wants to be doing.” Lindhome says that this was the same house with the brick walls in the servants’ quarters, an estate called the Elms, a home built in the late 1800s by the Berwind family – they counted Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany as personal friends, and refused even the most logical requests for time off from their servants. “I think they were working 18-hour days, seven days a week. And they wanted one hour of free time and the guy was like, no,” Leggero tells me.
“They struck and he fired them,” Lindhome continues. The story of the Elms servant strike serves as the basis for an early episode where the Bellacourts’ help go on their own strike, much to the chagrin of head butler, Mr Peepers, played by Michael Ian Black. “[Peepers] wants things to stay exactly as they are. He doesn’t want rights,” Lindhome says. “Then, there are [servants] like Blanche or Flobelle who are more disgruntled,” Leggero continues. “I think that does reflect … In Downton, they do have disgruntled people.”
“But those disgruntled people get fired almost immediately,” Lindhome interjects. But Another Period isn’t all satire and social consciousness. One of the most striking images from season two is the aforementioned prosthetic vagina that appears in a most unexpected place on a human body. I ask who devised such a diabolical image.
“Why do you want to know whose idea it was? Because you think they’re a pervert?” Leggero retorts mischievously. The balance of absurdity with satire is of utmost importance to everyone on the set. “It’s not dirty for the sake of being dirty. There’s a cleverness to it, but it’s also silly and it can be dirty,” she explains.
Rubber vaginas might not be period-appropriate, unlike the taxidermy and oil paintings, but they certainly fit within the tone of the show. Before our chat ends, Leggero goes back into showrunner mode. “Our make-up artist made [the vagina] look amazing.” I couldn’t possibly disagree.
