2 out of 5

Created by: Danny McBride, Jody Hill

covers season 1

Jody Hill and Danny McBride have worked themselves into a very interesting corner of comedy.  Their style (Eastbound & Down, Superbad) certainly is influenced by and has influenced some of the comedic trends of this era: the man-child humor of the Apatow crew; cringe-comedy – which has become more bloated as our society gets more paranoiacally “aware” of itself; and also the R-rated action / bloody genre blends that seem to be an attempted revitalization of Beverly Hills Cop-era “adult” comedies.  All of these offshoots have shared players and crossovers, but the Hill / McBride combo offers one further wrinkle: A dare-you-to-watch meta-ness.

McBride’s Principal Neil Gamby in Vice Principals is not a likeable guy.  Using the McBride template, he’s full of himself, mean to people, childish, and bordering on dumb.  His sense of humor is base, and he responds in nigh-unbelievable tossed-off coarse flopped one-liners or insults.  This functioned as comedy in Eastbound because the surrounding world of sports was absurd in its own way; Vice Principals’ high school setting – backing Gamby and fellow vice principal Lee Russell’s (Walton Goggins) war to de-seat the new principal, Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hebert Gregory), so they can have a shot at the throne – is actually pretty normal.  The only counter-balance is the equally-unlikeable-to-Gamby Russell, who ups the obnoxiousness ante, but otherwise… you can see this as being a high school.  And here’s where the meta comes in: You can recognize Gamby.  He’s blown out of proportion, for sure, but you recognize his type, and it almost seems like McBride / Hill are purposefully going not for dark comedy, or cringe comedy, but almost anti-comedy in how unfunny some of Gamby’s behaviors and phrases are.  You watch, and realize you know these types of people; the total situation or scene is humorous in that sense, this after-the-fact reality mirroring going on, but it doesn’t exactly equal laughs at the moment.  And this all might not be purposeful.  It’s hard to say.  Which is why it doesn’t exactly work.

Vice Principals is imminently watchable if you’re down with McBride’s shtick, but Goggins in full crazy mode is maybe a step too far, and ends up pushing the humor down a questionable, mean-spirited path.  When the show begins to make some possible intentions clearer down the road – Gamby and Lee actually forming a friendship and not just enemies with a common enemy – the concept sharpens up and the purposefulness of what I’ve attempted to explain above becomes more plausible.  But that’s a long way down the road of this 9-episode first season.  Leading up to that, the show dabbles with a kind of over-the-top hazing sense of humor that’s imbalanced by the tone of the characters and setting.

The story is set for two seasons.  The ending of season one continues to build on the final few episodes’ promise, and also suggests that this will be a better binge than week-to-week experience.  The flaws I’m mentioning might disappear in context of the larger picture.  Unfortunately, it was aired week to week, and that gave me ample time to form an opinion on Gamby and crew that maybe wasn’t too favorable.