After a promotion is given to an outside hire, two co-workers conspire and devise a super-duper sneaky scheme to win the job they each feel they rightfully deserve — a storyline that’s been lazily applied to screenplays and scripts for a long, long time, even back before the works of Adam Sandler came to be.
When an out-of-state educator receives the principal position, the two vice principals in South Carolina brutally vandalize their own campus, spike the football team’s water jug with LSD and burn the newly employed principal’s house down quicker than an aluminum fork in the microwave.
It’s the plot of the first season of HBO’s Vice Principals, an original series co-created by Danny McBride and primary director Jody Hill. It also has a chance to be something special — as a dark comedy, not as an instructional guide for some high school’s staff retreat. That would be alarming.
Before discussing specifics on the show’s potential and in-season development, it must first be noted that Neal Gamby, portrayed by Danny McBride, sports a mustache throughout the entirety of the series that makes Tom Selleck’s look like my bar mitzvah peach fuzz. Depending on who you are, McBride with a top-notch lip-consuming stache is either a major deal sealer or deal breaker, so I thought I’d put it out there.
Gamby is a self-conscious, insult spewing vice principal at North Jackson High School with character traits most comparable to Dale from Step Brothers mixed with J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. He is coaxed into the attempted usurpation of Dr. Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) — the school’s new uber-qualified, straight out of Philadelphia principal — by his even less likable co-vice principal, Lee Russell. Played by Walton Goggins, Lee Russell is a preppy-dressed, southern talking faux-gentleman driven by an intense power fetish. He is a horrible human being and a wonderful character.
The three main characters are more complex than meets the eye. At home, Russell is perennially ridiculed by his Korean mother-in-law, a hard-nosed woman who offers compliments as often as Chick-fil-A serves on Sunday. Gamby is a divorced single parent whose wife has moved on to a motocross-obsessed husband who is becoming more and more of a second father figure in his daughter’s life. Dr. Brown took her two teenage boys from their established life in Philly into a foreign environment to escape a husband who she caught cheating. She is forced to live with the boys in a low-class hotel after their house burns down.
Gamby begins to resonate with Brown and her isolated, single-parent struggle. He shows (at least more so than Russell) a moral code and a softer side, one that earns him a stellar love interest in English teacher Amanda Snodgrass, played by Georgia King. It’s the same humanizing factor that allows the show to survive, giving it more layers of struggle beyond just two pissed off, privileged white guys taking down a black woman who earned her position fairly.
A sort of weird thing about Vice Principals is that you want the two main characters to lose. Each victory achieved by Gamby and Russell is heart-wrenching, as it doubles as their tormenting of a woman whose only goal is to make the place in which they work successful — something that should make you want to look up Michael Scott vs. Toby Flenderson clips from The Office. The “enemy” is really the hero, and the two people who think they are being heroes are actually just jackasses.
After the dramatic, cliff-hanger of an ending that was the show’s season one finale, Vice Principals is now like the last batter up with bases loaded and the scoreboard showing a three-run deficit. All the necessary elements for triumph are on the table, but will co-creators Hill and McBride have the deft touch needed to cross home plate victorious on season two?
