Another Period (Season One)

It’s a roast of “Downton Abbey”, reality television, and present-day politics—of course “Another Period” is unfocused to a fault. Some of its themes, characters and jokes get so messed up between conception and execution that the end result reads as hollow (Jason Ritter’s Frederick is superfluous outside of his relationship with Beatrice, for instance), and the finale does more to set up next season than pay off storylines. That said, this is fantastic satire most of the time, and the faults are easy to look past when the show jumps off a cliff into an ocean of dark comedy.

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