Vice Principals: Last Episode of New HBO Series Already Finished

While the first season of the Vice Principals TV show just premiered on HBO last night, The second and final season is already in the can. Co-creator and star Danny McBride says he and director/co-creator Jody Hill delivered the Vice Principals TV series finale to HBO last week. The duo executive produced the series with David Gordon Green, Jonathan Watson, and Stephanie Laing.

In addition to McBride, the complete two-season Vice Principals TV series stars: Walter Goggins, Kimberly Hébert Gregory, Georgia King, Busy Phillips, Shea Whigham, and Sheaun McKinney. Guest stars in the first season include Bill Murray, Susan Park, and Maya Love. The second season of Vice Principals is expected to premiere on HBO in 2017. When we know more, you will.

Here is more, from Variety:

 

I understand you originally conceived “Vice Principals” as a feature, but where did the idea come from?

It was floating around my head — the idea of these administrators at a high school battling for power seemed like a funny scenario for a power struggle. It was that kernel of an idea; I told Jody about it and he came to Virginia. We holed up for a week and pounded out the feature-length version of it. We really liked it, we liked the characters, but there was something about it unfolding in 90 minutes that didn’t feel original enough, you could see some of the punches coming. We didn’t really know how to correct that and we put it away.

After we finished “Eastbound” and thought about what was next, we really loved working with HBO and loved the idea of telling a longer story… We couldn’t get a nine hour movie greenlit, so this was a way to tell a nine hour story. Once we started to expand the feature into an 18 episode arc it started to really come alive. The show could take unexpected turns and follow detours for different characters, and see a story in a way you couldn’t have done with a feature.

“Vice Principals” was officially ordered by HBO over two years ago. Was it a long process to make?

We ended “Eastbound” in 2013 and we spent all of 2014 writing [“Vice Principals”]. We had a writers room open for a year and we wrote all 18 episodes before we shot. And then we spent all of last year shooting it all. We actually delivered the last episode of the whole series to HBO last week. For the first time I’m not thinking about vice principals fighting for a principal job anymore.

Did you pitch it as an 18-episode project? How did HBO react?

I thought it would be a hard sell for them because obviously if the show worked you would think they’d want it to keep going. But they liked the approach of, “let’s give people a story that has a confident beginning, middle and end.” We’re not trying to drag out plot points and story points in the hope we can drag this out for season after season. This is one school year. The first nine [episodes] are fall term and the back nine are spring term. It gave an immediacy to the storytelling, you could set things up and pay things off without having to drag out the narrative.

Was the plan always to split it into two seasons?

We followed the idea of a semester in a school. You’ve got two semesters and that seemed like a cool way to tell the story. It’ll make a little more sense once you’ve seen the whole thing but it is like two acts of the full story.

 

 

What do you think? Did you watch the first season premiere of Vice Principals on HBO? Are you disappointed that it will only run two seasons, or do you think that is kind of cool?