What’s the name of the show? Another Period
When does it premiere? Tuesday, 23 June, 10.30pm EST on Comedy Central. The first episode is also streaming now on Hulu Plus.
What is this show? The Bellacourts are the richest family in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1904. They get up to series of wacky adventures aided by a coterie of servants, who also have some secrets of their own.
This sure sounds a lot like Downton Abbey. It’s supposed to. It’s a parody of period dramas and reality shows.
What’s so funny about Downton Abbey? In this context, just about everything. Imagine changing a servant’s name to Chair, just because one of the selfish ladies of the house thought it would be amusing.
Is that amusing? Yeah, it really is. Especially when later in the episode, the clueless matriarch asks: “Chair. Is that Welsh?”
What’s the show’s pedigree? Comedians Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome created and wrote the show. They also star in it, playing the rich ladies of course. No one wants to be the servants, not even the servants.
What happens in the premiere? Lillian (Leggero) and Beatrice (Lindhome) find out that their best friends have died. They’re overjoyed because that means there are now two open slots in the Newport 400, the most elite list in all of society, which they intend on filling. (They intend on filling all the slots, really.) In order to do that, they have to impress the uppity arbiter of the list (Thomas Lennon). On the same day that he is coming to visit, Lillian and Beatrice’s homely sister Hortense (Artemis Pebdani) has invited her newest friend from the woman’s temperance league, Helen Keller. Also a new servant, Celine (Christina Hendricks) arrives at the house and quickly has her name changed to Chair. But we went over that already.
Is calling her Chair ever not funny? No.
Is this show any good? Since they’ve proliferated with the success of Downton Abbey, these Masterpiece Theater-type historical dramas are ripe for comedic picking and Another Period certainly takes the stuffing out of the stuffed shirts you’d find in such dramas. It toys with the conventions of yesterday in an absurd way – the Bellacourt matriarch Dodo (Paget Brewster) is addicted to morphine, no one is literate enough to read a telegram, and the Bellacourts wait for their servants to undress them before getting it on. This calls attention to both the actual ills of the period and the quaintness we imbue on all those olde thyme trappings, as miserable as they might have been at the time.
There is also an absurdity to the wealth and blatant disregard for humanity that we see so often in shows like the Real Housewives of Everywhere USA and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Beatrice and her brother Frederick (Jason Ritter), who are in love, go “lawn boating” where they have a servant drag them around the grass in a canoe. The sisters become enraged when Helen Keller breaks a Ming vase because they only have 17 of them. Lillian’s mother threatens to put down “two of her 12 horses”, unless she unhands the servant serving her cheese at “cheese time” so that her sister can use the servant in her own way.
Naturally with a parody like this it’s hard to imagine it going on for seasons on end without the jokes getting stale or quite one-note. There is an attempt at the end of the pilot to give the show a bit of a soap opera element that will be helpful to give the season a greater arc, but the strain to find new sources of humor outside of incestuous relationships, servant cruelty, and Lillian and Beatrice’s gay husbands (Brian Huskey and David Wain) is already showing. Another Period goes back to the same wells a little bit too often, but the well is certainly deep enough for a great first season.
Which characters will you love? Lindhome plays Beatrice as the stupid, pretty one and gets some of the best lines with her pure idiocy. Hendricks is playing her character Chair with a sort of dramatic seriousness that elevates it above all the other characters and plays into the stereotype of both the “noble savage” of the wise servant girl and the downstairs schemer that we all love to root for.
Which characters will you hate? You won’t really hate Mr Peepers (Michael Ian Black), the head butler formerly known as Mitch, but the show needs to figure out what to do with Black’s considerable comedic talents rather than just giving him a stiff upper lip and looking disdainfully at the other servants.
What’s the best thing about it? The finale of the pilot features all of the characters, Helen Keller included, going crazy with the “cocaine wine”. I haven’t laughed that hard in quite some time.
What’s the worst thing about it? There is an awful lot of screaming. Loud doesn’t always equal funny.
Sometimes it does. Yes, sometimes it does, but should be used a bit more sparingly.
Should you watch this show? Yes, if you’ve ever made fun of Downton Abbey at a dinner party or find the more humorous aspects of the Real Housewives appealing. Otherwise something a bit more broad will probably be more appealing.
