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TEACHERS AT WAR!
A hilarious new sitcom starring Bill Murray sees two very different deputies vying for the top job at a US school – with echoes of Trump and Clinton...
Abattle for power in America is going to be played out across our TV screens this summer and autumn. Two polar opposites will slug it out hoping to land their ultimate job. It’s set to be a war of attrition where anything goes in the fight for supreme power.
It sounds like the race for the White House between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but no, this is the hilarious struggle between Neal Gamby and Lee Russell to become principal of North Jackson High School, in Sky’s new sitcom Vice Principals.
The nine-part series, which is along the lines of Jack Whitehall’s sitcom Bad Education, with – be warned – very strong language, has a star turn from comedy legend Bill Murray, and has been in development for years. The fact it’s airing now, when the US Presidency is being fought for, is apparently a coincidence.
‘I know people are saying the show is some kind of carefully timed political satire but it’s pure chance it’s coming out now,’ says Danny McBride, the actor who co-wrote the series and plays Vice Principal Gamby.
It’s the retirement of Principal Welles, played by Ghostbusters star Bill Murray, that fires the starting gun on Gamby and Russell’s race for the top job. At the start of the series, viewers will see Welles lead his final school assembly before leaving to look after his seriously ill wife.
‘Russell favours the more considered political approach to gaining power – schmoozing fellow staff members, such as the young and impressionable English teacher Amanda Snodgrass, in order to curry favour,’ explains Walton Goggins, who plays Russell and is best known for the role of detective Shane Vendrell in the Emmy Award-winning drama The Shield. ‘Gamby, on the other hand, favours a more direct approach.’
The heavy-set Gamby threatens Russell with violence if he doesn’t step aside. And when that doesn’t work, he tries to win over the people he believes are the real power brokers at North Jackson High – the kitchen staff and cleaners, who keep their ears to the ground. ‘He makes a beeline for this cafeteria worker Dayshawn, but he goes about it in a ham-fisted way,’ says Danny McBride, best known for hit US baseball sitcom Eastbound & Down. ‘He’s like a bull in a china shop.’
By the end of the first episode, both Gamby and Russell are distraught when outsider Dr Belinda Brown is made principal. But how long can she last with those two plotting against her?
The character of Gamby has already invited comparisons in the US with
Tim Oglethorpe Vice Principals, Tuesday, 9.35pm, Sky Atlantic. have sympathy for Gamby. ‘He’s got money problems, he’s gone through a painful divorce and he has an alphamale masculinity that nowadays is seen as oppressive and narrow-minded. This could be his very last chance for power.’ Of course, Lee Russell will have something to say about that! Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for the US Presidency, though Danny McBride denies basing him on the tough-talking billionaire.
‘Gamby is a figment of my and cocreator Jody Hill’s imagination, though I can understand why people could see the similarities,’ says McBride, ‘as Gamby speaks his mind in a way that’s insensitive to others.’
Even so, McBride hopes people will