WHO DIDN’T DO IT?
Endless suspects in the shooting of Gamby as Vice Principals returns
NEW YORK At the end of last season’s fiercely absorbing Vice Principals, administrator Neal Gamby was left sprawled on the pavement of the North Jackson High parking lot in a pool of blood, gunned down by an unknown assailant.
Could this be payback from Dr. Belinda Brown, the former North Jackson principal who was overthrown by Gamby in cahoots with his sometime-ally Lee Russell (even as they stayed bitter rivals, both vying for Brown’s job)?
Nothing is so simple on Vice Principals.
“It’s not like there’s just one person Gamby can point to who could have done it,” says Danny McBride, who plays him, and can’t help but chuckle. What’s so funny about attempted murder? For starters, Gamby is such an indiscriminate jerk! “It’s like he’s rubbed EVERYBODY he’s ever encountered so wrong that ANYONE could have done it.” Even his co-conspirator Lee!
Upon his recovery, Neal will spend this second and concluding nine-episode season, which premières Sunday on HBO, trying to flush out, and wreak vengeance on, whomever it was who tried to off him.
He will also resume his dogged campaign (in partnership with Lee when they’re not in cutthroat competition) to land the grand prize: his name on the North Jackson principal’s office door.
Among the many things that make Vice Principals so funny, yet so poignant: No one could be less fit for the job than this misanthropic lout — unless it is Lee, a machiavellian dandy.
A creator and writer of Vice Principals, McBride (Eastbound & Down, This is the End) has joined co-star Walton Goggins (The Shield, Justified, Six) to report on getting back to school for this series, and to account for how the show is in a class by itself.
For instance: The half-hour format and its reigning pair of knuckleheads suggest that Vice Principals is a comedy. Which it is. But isn’t.
For all its outrageousness, the series is solidly grounded, and populated with deceptively wellrounded characters played by a solid cast.
“This is a complex character study of two morally obtuse human beings,” Goggins sums up.
“We use the broad comedy just to trick the audience,” says McBride, “to make the viewers think they’re going to get the usual runof-the-mill comedy — and then we sucker punch them with some real drama.
Suddenly they have no idea what the show’s going to take seriously and what it’s NOT going to take seriously. And ultimately they don’t really know what they want to have happen.
“Once we get the audience there, they’re just putty in our hands, and we can take them anywhere.”
Goggins says “anywhere” also applies to him as an actor inhabiting a character he doesn’t need to pigeonhole. “You turn yourself over to an imaginary set of circumstances,” he says. “You can go anywhere with the role and not judge the outcome. It’s no more complicated than that.”
“I never look at anything I write in terms of a genre,” says McBride.
“I just don’t think life is that way. Some of the funniest stuff can happen in the moments of greatest tragedy. We approach the show as if it’s a drama and then we find the comedy within that.
“We’ll even take punch lines out of the scripts. I want the jokes to hide themselves and emerge when you’re least expecting them. I think our comedy works if these characters feel real and they’re taking what’s important to them so seriously that it’s funny — because they’re so invested in what they want.”