Another Period, starring Riki Lindhome and Natasha Leggero as the Bellacourt sisters — two new-money gajillionaires in 1902 Newport, Rhode Island — premieres tonight on Comedy Central. The premise, originally pitched as a Real Housewives-type show set against the Gilded Age, has since morphed away from the original reality show-style conceit into a serialized comedy directed by Jeremy Konner, best known as the guy who brought Drunk History to television.
Rotten Tomatoes visited the set of Another Period, an impressive old mansion in the Silver Lake Hills section of Los Angeles, to speak with Konner about capturing the excesses of the turn of the twentieth century, while satirizing the self-obsessed culture of now.
Sarah Ricard for Rotten Tomatoes: At this point, would you say it’s harder to do the historical stuff?
Konner: It takes a lot of people working really hard to get everything in its place for period stuff. This is very different than Drunk History. In Drunk History, we embrace mustaches falling off, and goofy wigs, and a car driving by in the background, a West Tek sign in front of the house. [Another Period] shouldn’t be anachronistic. The joke is that it’s very realistic and very appropriate to the time.
RT: For you, what’s the appeal of doing something set in the past?
Konner: Natasha and Riki approached me about doing this initially for the [pilot] presentation, I think, because of my experience with Drunk History. I didn’t necessarily seek out another period comedy. However, now that it’s come to me, I’m thrilled and I do feel like it’s a world I’m comfortable in.
RT: Historical TV is very popular right now. Do you think Mad Men was the turning point for that?
Konner: I think it was. I think even just when you look at the pilot of Mad Men and you see all that great stuff with the kids running around with plastic bags on their heads and the guy just smacks this kid at the party and how terrible people are to women, and you realize how insane it was. You can’t believe that this is what everybody was like so recently. I think a lot of the historical shows that have been on have had a lot of comedic elements to them, and not necessarily intentionally. Downton is hilarious, and I don’t think Julian Fellowes means it to be hilarious all the time.
We really got excited about a lot of the real stuff. We have a scene with Christina Hendricks and Michael Ian Black where he is teaching her how when one of the family members walk through to hide and to just smash into a wall and pretend like you’re a piece of the furniture. That is completely reality. That is what they were told to do. They were told to be invisible, especially the female servants in this time. It’s really fun to be able to explore this time period and how crazy it is.
RT: What else surprised you as you were making the show?
Konner: Downton Abbey is set in a culture that has had a servant class and had wealth and castles for hundreds and hundreds of years if not longer. This is America, and all of the people in Newport at this time were 90 percent of the wealth concentrated in these summer cottages, which were actually palaces. It’s all new money. Nobody knows how to spend it. Almost all of them have some kind of rags-to-riches story that ends with them having the most amount of money that humans have ever had in history. It’s all steel, and oil, and Rockefeller, and Carnegie, and Astor. They all are just trying to one-up each other with how much they can spend on these mansions, these marble palaces — and the servants are just regular people. They’re not people who have been in a serving class for a thousand years. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Nobody knows the rules of society. They’re all sort of making it up as they go along, and they’re all terrible to each other.
RT: Are you also satirizing contemporary culture in this show?
Konner: Absolutely. We’ve watched tons of Kardashians and Housewives. Doing a period comedy gives us license to make fun of our current times and our current society. I think we can get away with way more. We can get away with saying some really awful things and treating [everybody] terribly.
There are so many things on our show that are actually based in reality. There was an episode where Natasha’s character Lilian throws a dog dinner party for the highest member of society. A dog dinner party is something that Mamie Fish actually threw. Everyone in Newport brought their dogs. They spent ungodly amounts of money on it, and one of the dogs ended up being carried out because it got sick, a Dachshund. It was front-page news all over the country. It made everyone in America hate this sort of Newport society. This is all the Gilded Age. It’s not golden, it’s just covered in gold. It’s s— covered in very nice shine.
RT: A dog dinner party sounds like something a Real Housewife might do.
Konner: Right. We also have a lot of humor that’s [about modern life]. The other day we shot a scene where Natasha and Riki are reading telegrams, and their sister Hortense comes out, and she’s like, “God, we really have to talk about what’s going on with our father and the magnet mines; it’s really terrible what he’s doing to the children,” and they’re just reading telegrams and they’re like, “Yeah, hold on one second.” She’s like, “Can’t you look up from your telegrams for five seconds?” We have a lot of jokes that are trying to find what we did then and how it can be shown now.
RT: How do you satirize something that’s already so absurd by its very nature?
Konner: I think that’s why Comedy Central wanted us to move away from [the original pitch of] a reality show because then you really have to stick to the reality show jokes. Whereas in this, the humor’s opened up to the whole world. Just being able to really explore the world and change styles and have a lot of fun with it really makes it its own thing. It’s exciting that it’s not a parody of anything. It’s not a parody of Downton Abbey. It’s not a parody of a reality show. It’s its own comedy.
RT: What do you think it is about this project that has been attracting so many stars, similar to Drunk History, which has a roster of who’s who in comedy?
Konner: I know actors really like to dress up, and they really like to do something theatrical. Comedians don’t get to do it as much as they’d like. It’s not quite a sketch, and it’s not quite drama. They get to play around.
Another Period starts tonight on Comedy Central at 10:30 p.m. Watch the first episode now on CC.com.
