Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsUpper-class Twits of the Year.
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2016
Hilarious little oddball. It's often described as a Downton Abbey parody, but the humor is a lot darker, more violent and surreal than you might expect from that description - at it's best there's a Monty Pythonesque quality to it. While most characters in Downton are generally good-hearted and the servants are usually treated kindly, here the upper classes are useless buffoons who treat the servants like garbage, and in return the servants generally give back fawning, undying loyalty, up to and including committing murder on the family's behalf.
A whole parade of historical figures blunder into the Bellacourts' orbit, including Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Ponzi. So help me God I thought I was going to bust a gut when Leon Trotsky and Mahatma Gandhi get into an an argument and Gandhi bellows "Sounds like you're a member of the BITCH CASTE!" It's stuffed with little throwaway jokes, like how one of Lillian (Natasha Leggero)'s middle names is "Hitler" (yes, it's stupid, but I laugh every time they say it) or when one of the servants, who is trying to get out of servitude by landing a factory job, casually mentions that she has an interview with the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. And kudos to the writers for almost never explaining historical references and trusting the audience to get it.
