Another Period — whose third season premieres Tuesday, January 23 on Comedy Central — is likely one of the best shows you’re missing out on. The whip smart series is very Downton Abbey meets Keeping Up with the Kardashians, then stuffed to the brim with satirical allusions to power, sexism and politics. And it’s all thanks to stars Riki Lindhome and Natasha Leggero, who also helm the series as creators and writers. And neither of them take prisoners.
For example: Even though it’s set in the Gilded Age, like many other comedy series of the last year, the election of President Trump casts a dark (albeit hilarious) shadow. “You should have been in our writer’s room when we had to change our whole season when Trump became president,” Leggero says.
“The problem with making fun of Trump is that there’s a new, fresh hell every day. If you started writing an episode about Girther gate, it would just go away in a day, and he would do something else awful.”
Still, this season you can expect the requisite amount of Trump adjacent stuff — just, not really on purpose. “There’s a sort of Roy Moore-esque storyline that we actually wrote before any of it happened,” Lindhome says. Add that to the Trump administration’s attempted roll back on women’s rights and you’ve got something very frightening, indeed. “It’s really scary how far we haven’t come.”
“One thing we learned from the Gilded Age is that it was a time in history where women had so little,” Leggero adds. “A lot of it happened in Newport [Rhode Island, where Another Period is set] — there were all these rich women who wanted to be able to vote, [and] they were working on getting the vote for 70 years before that. They’d been working for so long and we’re still working.”
Still, even with those heavy themes, Another Period manages to be a delight. A super funny, well constructed, and horribly overlooked delight. And the best part? It’s ripe for physical comedy.
“We are obsessed with Dynasty,’” Leggero says. (Think: the original, not the “Gossip Girl” lite reboot.) “If you watch Dynasty, they have all of these compilations of them dragging each other through clothes racks and swamps. Our director would get annoyed with us and be like, ‘What is this Dynasty style cat fight? Do we really need this?’” She laughs.
“We just really want to do a fight in a fountain,” Lindhome says. Here’s hoping their dream comes true.
