'Another Period' Crosses 'Downton Abbey' With the Kardashians for Thin Laughs
Another Period, the new Comedy Central show premiering Tuesday night, wants to cross Downton Abbey with Keeping Up With the Kardashians. It’s an excellent comedy idea in theory, linking those two TV exercises in wealth-porn and decadent excess. Alas, Another Period isn’t funny enough to sustain its premise.
The series is set in Newport, Rhode Island, at the turn of the 20th century. Show creators Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome, each exceedingly clever comic performers, star as spoiled-rotten sisters Lillian and Beatrice Bellacourt, who live in Downton-style splendor. The sisters are fed and dressed by a battery of servants headed up by Michael Ian Black’s head butler Peepers, who’s just hired a new maid, Celine, played by Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, and whom the sisters immediately nickname “Chair.” The name sticks as a running joke.
Other running jokes: incest punchlines between Beatrice and her brother Frederick, and Paget Brewster making the most of her role in occupying the Maggie Smith-sarcastic position in the show as Dodo Bellacourt, the morphine-addicted matriarch of the family.
Add Thomas Lennon, David Wain, Brett Gelman, and David Koechner in various upstairs-downstairs roles, and you’ve got a hugely talented cast that seems to be operating under a state of mass hypnosis, convinced that what they’re doing is funny. It rarely is. Most of the jokes hinge on exaggerating the Downton Abbey-ish mode of living — the servants duties include “winding the clock and exercising the swans”; the servant Peepers jumps into action when a member of the family rings “the custard bell.”
Thank goodness Comedy Central’s press website is as buggy and screen-freezing as most other networks’ — after multiple attempts on every imaginable browser over two days, I was almost relieved to quit the second episode about halfway through. (Really, if TV producers and stars knew the circumstances under which a lot of TV critics view their shows these days, they’d probably scream.) The cast of Another Period is so rich, deep, and good that it almost carries you past the thinness of the material they’re performing. Almost.
Another Period airs on Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.
