Vice Principals

Vice Principals began as a joke Danny McBride and Jody Hill had been kicking around since their Eastbound & Down days: a school where the two assistant principals are the worst people in the building. HBO ordered it straight to series in 2014, and the first of eighteen episodes aired on July 17, 2016. McBride plays Neal Gamby, who runs the discipline office at North Jackson High in a small South Carolina town and treats a hallway pass like a felony charge. Walton Goggins plays Lee Russell, his counterpart, a man who quotes poetry and wears a blazer to a cafeteria fight.

The premise is almost insultingly simple, and that's the point. Longtime principal Bill Welles announces he's leaving to care for his wife, and both vice principals assume the chair is theirs. Then the district hires Dr. Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hébert Gregory), an outsider with actual credentials, and the two men who despise each other have to join forces. What follows is a season of schemes that would get a real educator arrested, played with a straight face and a lot of profanity.

Around the edges, the show built a small town's worth of specific characters. Georgia King is Amanda Snodgrass, the young teacher Gamby pursues with a total lack of self-awareness. Busy Philipps plays Gale, his ex-wife, and Shea Whigham her new partner Ray, whose very existence annoys Gamby. Sheaun McKinney's Dayshawn runs the cafeteria and serves as the closest thing the show has to a moral compass. Dale Dickey's Officer Nash says almost nothing and is somehow the scariest person on screen. McBride and Hill wrote it as a closed story from the start, two seasons and out, which is why the ending lands the way it does. [edit]

North Jackson High sits in a South Carolina town small enough that everyone knows everyone's business, and for years it has been run by Bill Welles, a principal so mild he barely registers. When Welles announces he's stepping down to look after his ailing wife, the school's two vice principals see an opening. Neal Gamby has spent years as the discipline guy, screaming at teenagers over dress code violations, convinced his toughness has earned him the job. Lee Russell has spent the same years being charming to the right people, cultivating the superintendent, and assuming the job is his because he wants it more elegantly.

The district doesn't consult either of them. It hires Dr. Belinda Brown, a confident administrator from outside the district who immediately starts reorganizing things. Gamby and Russell each try to undermine her alone, fail, and then do the thing that neither of them wants: they team up. Their alliance is the engine of the first season. They bug her office, dig into her past, sabotage her initiatives, and betray each other roughly every other episode before crawling back into partnership because neither has anyone else. The comedy comes from how seriously these two grown men take a job that mostly involves hall passes and lunch duty, and from how badly they treat the people around them.

Gamby's home life is a mess of his own making. He's divorced from Gale, who has moved on with Ray, a decent guy Gamby cannot stop needling. He fixates on Amanda Snodgrass, a teacher half his age, with a persistence that reads as sad rather than romantic. His only real friend is Dayshawn, who works the cafeteria line and listens to Gamby's problems with a look that says he has heard all of this before. Russell, meanwhile, keeps his own life sealed off, presenting a polished surface that cracks in ways the first season only hints at.

Season two picks up after the power struggle has resolved in a way nobody planned for, and it asks a different question. Getting the job turns out to be the easy part. Holding it, and being any good at it, is where both men fall apart. The second season pushes Gamby and Russell's relationship past scheming and into something closer to genuine dependence, and it lets the show get unexpectedly sad without dropping the cruelty or the profanity. The episodes get quieter and stranger. Characters who seemed like running jokes get real interior lives. By the final stretch, the question isn't who runs North Jackson High. It's whether either of these men can admit what they actually want, which is not a title but a friend.[edit]