Profane Is The New Boring: HBO’s Painfully Unfunny ‘Vice Principals’ (TV REVIEW)

[rating=2.00] “Vice Principals”

Earlier this year, during the first day of SXSW film, Danny McBride and Walter Goggins gave a brief appearance in the early afternoon to discuss their new upcoming series, Vice Principals. What struck both me and my fellow Glide Magazine contributor Danielle Houtkooper (or Koop, as we call her) was how uninteresting their whole interview/appearance was. Surely these two charismatic celebrities would’ve offered something funny, interesting, or insightful, something beyond the bit of info that we got — which was that Bill Murray was going to be in it.

Granted, that same pilot episode was being shown at a special sneak preview later that night, something that I stood in line for but didn’t manage to get into, so maybe they were just trying to save everything for the big reveal. Looking back now, if there was a big reveal, or even a remotely funny moment, it’s most definitely not in the show’s first episode.

Star and co-creator McBride plays Neal Gamby, the Vice Principal of Discipline, and Goggins plays Lee Russell, the Vice Principal of Curriculum. In the opening scene, the current Principal, Bill Murray (who’s about two years past the ‘put me in this role and it’ll be charming’ expiration date), retires. Gamby and Russell both want the job. Oh, and they hate each other, gleefully putting their own petty rivalry against the kids they’re supposed to help educate.

While I’m all for gleefully simple premises, we’re never given any real insight as to why Gamby wants the job so much. This kind of thing doesn’t require much in the way of elaborate backstories or intrinsic motivations, but it does require something, anything, besides what we’re given — which is nothing.

We get even less from Goggins’ Lee Russell, who exists only in a handful of scenes to establish himself as Namby’s rival, which is something that the show’s cold open already made abundantly clear. It’s a real shame Goggins’ isn’t given equal screen time, as he delivers his saccharin-tinged southern drawl with a gleeful, sociopathic charm. Instead we follow Namby around for the entire episode, which only proves McBride’s acting range doesn’t extend past cutting off his mullet and growing a goofy mustache.

What we do get is Namby’s a short-sighted, opportunistic blowhard (shocking), with McBride putting about as much enthusiasm as you’d expect into a character that’s basically Kenny Powers, but as a public school administrator, not a gym teacher. It’s so blatantly derivative that it makes the entire series seem like McBride and co-creator Jody Hill are just taking the unused jokes from the first season of Eastbound & Down and re-purposing them with minimal effort.

The other non-Goggins bright spot comes from a near-unrecognizable Shea Whigham, who plays Ray Liptrapp, the husband to Namby’s ex-wife, who tries to be genuinely supportive of his new extended family. Liptrapp’s good intentions are met with nothing but scorn from Namby, which would be funny, if absolutely everything wasn’t also met with nothing but scorn from Namby.

Anyway, after a new principal, Dr. Belinda Brown (Kimberly Herbert Gregory), is brought into the high school, Namby are Russell agree to form an alliance to bring her down, which is supposed to be enough to hook viewers in for nine more episodes. It isn’t.

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