HBO goes back to school
Walton Goggins and Danny McBride are put to the test in ‘Vice Principals’
Welcome to HBO’s signature vice: an overindulgence of favored talents.
The network has a habit of latching on to certain actors and writers and giving them free rein. While that makes sense when you’re dealing with producers such as Larry David, David Milch or David Simon, it’s harder to justify when the writer and actor is Danny McBride — and the bewilderingly awful show he gives you is Vice Principals (Sunday, 10:30 ET/PT, eEEE out of four).
Whatever one thought of McBride’s Eastbound and Down, one could at least see the appeal of its tastelessness-is-all sense of humor and its cluelessly narcissistic main character, a former baseball pitcher turned gym teacher. Anything even marginally appealing about Vice Principals is overwhelmed by the witless ugliness, rampant stupidity and utter cluelessness about the times in which we live.
McBride has his fans, of course, and nothing in
Vice is likely to surprise or offend the most ardent among them. That can’t be said, unfortunately, for fans of his co-star, Walton Goggins, a gifted, charismatic actor who has shone brightly in a wide range of roles.
Goggins can do almost anything — except, it seems, make sense of a character who is defined by his vulgarities and his prissy gay-stereotype mannerisms. If your dream has always been to see Goggins play a relentlessly nasty, effeminate man who often pretends to be even more effeminate than he is, consider
Vice a dream come true. McBride (who created the show with Jody Hill) and Goggins star as Neal Gamby and Lee Russell, vice principals and bitter rivals for the top school job that just became vacant. When it goes, instead, to Dr. Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hebert Gregory), a black woman with a PhD., they temporarily unite to bring her down.
Thus begins a string of racially tinged insults that are meant to be daring and are instead just clumsy and offensive. They insult the size of her posterior. They mock the way she prays. All of which leads to that seemingly inevitable moment when the welleducated, gracious black woman drops her disguise and speaks “street” in response, because of course she does.
Still, none of that may prepare you for the climax of their plans: Neal and Lee break into her home, destroy her possessions and set her house on fire. Yes, that’s a spoiler — let that go and focus instead on the idea of two white men vandalizing a black woman’s home. Then, please contemplate what HBO thinks is funny and appropriate about that scene, when race relations are so tense and when so many are already upset about the portrayal of violence against women in the media.
I could go on, but why bother? And I could have gone on watching — but I stopped at three episodes, which is three more than I’d advise you to view.
There are better vices out there to occupy your time. Pick one.
Thus begins a string of racially tinged insults that are meant to be daring and are instead just clumsy and offensive.