Peeling away all the wackiness, Another Period is actually very sad.
Creators Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome have hidden real life issues in their overtly wacky and brash parody of Downton Abbey.Another Period follows the misadventures of the extremely wealthy Bellacourt family in 1902. They are stupid, selfish, misguided, ignorant, and all around horrible people. When a beautiful new servant girl, Celine (Christina Hendricks), is hired, she is immediately renamed "Chair" by one of the Bellacourt sisters. Chair is there with an agenda though; she is having an affair with Commodore Bellacourt (David Koechner), and she is planning to conceive his child and take over his estate.
Lindhome and Leggero both play the idiot Bellacourt sisters, Beatrice and Lillian. Lillian (Leggero) is vapid and only acts with selfish desire. Beatrice (Lindhome) is sweet but a complete and total dullard. The girls are married to Victor (Brian Huskey) and Albert (David Wain), who are having their own love affair together. Beatrice and her brother Frederick (Jason Ritter) are in love and sleeping together in a unabashed display of incest.
The characters display perfectly abhorrent behavior for any era. The Bellacourts treat their servants like they are trash, yelling and throwing things at them when something is not just right. Lillian and Beatrice ask their husbands to fake their own deaths so they can be granted divorces. Their mother, played to perfection by the amazing Paget Brewster, is an opium addict who barely has a handle on reality. Michael Ian Black dons an indistinguishable accent as Peepers, the head butler. He is fully devoted to the job and the Bellacourt family despite the fact that he is treated like something caught on the bottom of their heeled button up boots.
If you peer through the outrageous behavior and hilarity, you'll see some pretty dark issues representative of the time emerge. One maid, having just come back from a mental hospital, where she was treated for "hysteria", is ridiculed and treated like she is contagious. Another footman is raped, or, as they put it in the show, "ravished" by a female guest of the Bellacourts, and he is ignored and made to look a fool when he tries to tell anyone. In another scene, Chair is to break the news to the children that their fathers have died, but when she tells them they begin to mourn for the death of Peepers, for he is the only male figure they have ever known.
Peeling away all the wackiness, Another Period is actually very sad and is trying to say something about not only how people were treated back then but how we treat each other today. It would seem that the only way Lindhome and Leggero could be taken seriously on their views is by hiding it in a comedy. Good for them and for us then that they are so adept in making us laugh.
score 7/10
stinadianne 20 August 2015
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3301555/14813
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