"Vice Principals", "Ballers" and "BoJack Horseman" top this week"s TV must-sees

Vice Principals Season 1, Ep. 1: Farewell Assembly (HBO)

Bill Harris" TV must-sees for the week of July 17

1. Vice Principals

Debut

Danny McBride and Walton Goggins star as two vice-principals who are vying for the top job at their school. There"s a vacancy when the longtime principal, played by Bill Murray in a guest-starring role, is forced to quit due to family concerns. But how will the duelling veeps react if neither of them gets the promotion?

When: Sunday, July 17 on HBO

2. Ballers

Season-2 debut

Focusing on the lives of pro football players in Miami, this stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Spencer Strasmore, a former player turned financial manager who is trying to save today"s athletes from their own monetary recklessness. Andy Garcia joins the cast this season as Andre, Spencers business rival.

When: Sunday, July 17 on HBO

3. Power

Season-3 debut

James St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick) now is out of the drug game, owns some new nightclubs, and is in a rekindled relationship with his first love, Angela (Lela Loren). But just as James begins to believe that his former criminal persona finally is dead, he"s forced to realize that it isn"t so easy to kill a "Ghost."

When: Sunday, July 17 on Super Channel (Starz in the U.S.)

4. Degrassi: Next Class

Season-2 debut

The new campaign for this latest instalment in the Degrassi franchise picks up after the traumatic Snow Ball, which saw students enduring a frightening school lockdown. Meanwhile, friendly pranking takes a bad turn as the Degrassi girls volleyball team goes too far when retaliating against Northern Tech (boo, hiss).

When: Tuesday, July 19 on Family

5. BoJack Horseman

Season-3 debut

BoJack (voice of Will Arnett) is grappling with his legacy while galloping through an increasingly muddy Oscar campaign for his star-making turn in the Secretariat biopic. BoJack wants to believe he has made a lasting impact, but he isn"t sure. Sounds kind of like a drama, right? Um, no, that"s horse hockey.

When: Friday, July 22 on Netflix

6. Bones

Season-11 finale

This long-running series starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz has been granted an upcoming 12-episode 12th season to wrap things up. A solid performer such as this deserves a solid send-off. Anyway, as the 11th season concludes, the team attempts to find the "Puppeteer," which I assume is not meant merely literally.

When: Thursday, July 21 on Fox, Global

7. Looking: The Movie

Debut/series finale

This aired as a series for two seasons before getting axed. It was granted this movie to say farewell, although a Saturday in July isn"t exactly a marquee time slot. Nonetheless, after living in Denver for nearly a year, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) returns to San Francisco to celebrate the wedding of some old friends.

When: Saturday, July 23 on HBO

8. Ride With Norman Reedus

Season-1 finale

The final episode in this six-episode season is titled The Keys With Peter Fonda, which pretty much describes it. The Walking Dead"s Reedus travels by motorcycle from Naples to Key West, Fla., with Fonda, a 1960s counterculture icon. Fonda is 76 now, so safety first on the chopper, please.

When: Sunday, July 17 on AMC

9. Angel From h**l

Series finale

Remember how much publicity this Jane Lynch series initially received? Well, hype don"t hunt, as they say. The show was cancelled after only five episodes last winter, and CBS has been burning off the remaining episodes this summer, just to fill space. Back-to-back episodes will clip the wings. Angel out.

When: Saturday, July 23 on CBS

10. Between

In a desperate effort to see if the cure works, Liam (Steven Grayhm) and Wiley (Jennette McCurdy) must find someone who is about to turn 22. So let"s see now, in this day and age, where should the search begin for 22-year-olds? Um, how about in their parents" basements? OK, come on now, that"s funny.

When: Thursday, July 21 on City

Twitter: @billharris_tv

bharris@postmedia.com

Source: http://www.torontosun.com/2016/07/17/vice-principals-ballers-and-bojack-horseman-top-this-weeks-tv-must-sees

Continue Reading ..

Danny McBride on Vice Principals and Whether Kenny Powers Would Back Trump

Vice Principals: A Conversation With Danny McBride and Walton Goggins (HBO)

The actor on why he decided to say goodbye to Eastbound & Down and take on a new challenge with Vice Principals, an HBO comedy 10 years in the making.

Danny McBride and Jody Hill started writing Vice Principals ten years ago. Before Pineapple Express. Before Tropic Thunder. Before anyone had even heard the name Kenny Powers. The limited TV series, which premieres on HBO Sunday, began as a follow-up to the pairs cult classic The Foot Fist Way. But then McBride accidentally became a movie star.

Based on McBrides experience of returning to his Virginia hometown to be a substitute teacher after his first, failed attempt to make it in Hollywood, the script for Vice Principals had been set aside in favor of Eastbound & Down, the HBO comedy that made McBride a bankable comedy star and turned his character Kenny Powers into a household nameat least in certain weed-smoke-filled houses.

A decade later, after four seasons of Eastbound & Down and dozens of big-screen roles for McBride, he and Hill returned to the Vice Principals script and reimagined it on a larger scale. We decided to open it up into an 18-episode series, make it crazier, explore detours that we wouldnt have been able to do in a feature, McBride tells The Daily Beast by phone the morning after a late night at the shows Los Angeles premiere.

Whats appealing about TV to me is the idea that you dont have to be confined to a story that takes place in two hours, McBride says. But at the same time, he does not like the idea of keeping a show going forever and ever just for the sake of it, favoring a sense of finality over longevity.

I want to know that its going somewhere, he says. So with Eastbound we always had the idea that it was a contained story. That show was originally only meant to have three seasons, but HBO ended up convincing McBrides team to produce a fourth, a decision about which he still appears to have misgivings.

With Vice Principals, he says he deliberately wanted to tell one unique story, which is why all 18 episodes were written before a single scene was shot. While McBride says he has no intention of continuing the series after it meets its natural end point, he laughs as he admits he once said the same thing about Eastbound & Down.

Not being tied down to one television series gives him time for even more ambitious projects. McBride has a role in Ridley Scotts upcoming Alien: Covenant and he and Hill finally shot their second feature this past year. The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter, due in theaters next year, is a father-and-son story starring Josh Brolin that McBride describes as a comedic Revenant. Plus, hes not ruling out the possibility that he could play the voice of KITT in a film remake of Knight Rider that is rumored to star Chris Pratt in the David Hasselhoff role. While no one has specifically offered him the chance to play the talking car yet, McBride says sure, if it was cool, he would do it.

In his new show, McBride plays Neal Gamby, a divorced father who takes his job as one of two vice principals at a South Carolina high school deadly seriously. But for the show to work, they needed the perfect person to play, as McBride says, one of the funniest, craziest, [most] layered characters they had even written: Gambys rival-slash-partner-in-crime Lee Russell. We really needed the right kind of actor, McBride says, someone who has the comedic chops, but also dramatic abilities.

They zeroed in on Walton Goggins, best known for playing outlaw preacher Boyd Crowder on six seasons of Justified. Walton is one of those dangerous actors that I just like, McBride says. Every time Ive seen him on screen I wonder what hes going to say or what hes going to do...We got down on our hands and knees and begged him to join us.

If McBrides character in the show is a righteous, sad-sack disciplinarian, Goggins Lee Russell is even more insidious and unnerving. Neal Gamby might let his true feelings about someone slip out in an expletive-laced tirade, but Russell will stay all smiles and Southern pleasantries on the surface with a violent rage seething underneath. When the two men engage in an epic act of vandalism in one early episode, it is Goggins character who takes the lead.

Another important casting choice was the beloved principal both men desperately want to replace. That character, played by none other than Bill Murray, appears briefly in the pilot before retiring to take care of his sick wife. How exactly did McBride convince Murray to make a rare television cameo? It turns out that a chance meeting on an airplane from Charleston, South Carolina, where the series is shot, back to Los Angeles helped seal the deal.

McBride had recently co-starred in the film Rock the Kasbah with Murray and he had heard that the comedy legend was particularly fond of the city of Charleston. We knew we wanted somebody special for the role, he said of the outgoing principal part, so he spent the flight talking up Charleston with Murray. When McBride finally got a script to Murray a couple of weeks later, he heard back that the actor would be honored to play Principal Whats-his-name.

While Eastbound & Down was all about ego and celebrity with Kenny Powers at his core a self-centered person who was really just out for himself, out for his own glory and his own fame McBride does not believe his newest character is a selfish person at all. The type of stuff he does, he thinks hes doing whats best, that its for the greater good, he says. Neal Gamby may be fundamentally misguided, but hes not an egomaniac like Kenny Powers.

When McBride played a version of himself in 2013s apocalyptic comedy This Is the End, there was more than a hint of egomania in the way he interacted with former co-stars and supposed friends like James Franco and Seth Rogen. Things came to a head late in that film when McBride became the leader of a cannibalistic cult who kept Channing Tatum as his s*x slave on a leash.

Thank You!

You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason

But McBride insists hes nothing like the emotionally-disturbed characters he tends to portray. I just find it more interesting to create these stories around characters that youre not used to seeing, he says. Trying to take somebody thats so different from you or I and figuring out how to make an audience see the world through their eyes. By contrast, he says he would find it boring to tell stories about normal, well-behaved people, adding, I think the worlds more complicated than that.

Not too long ago, Goggins appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live and referred to McBride as the Woody Allen for flyover America, which can make his misguided characters seem like comedic avatars of the stereotypical Donald Trump voter. Reiterating that Vice Principals began its life a decade ago, McBride says it was certainly not his intention to reflect the current political climate with his show. But, he adds, the fact that this story about this crazy power struggle is happening in an election year is just lucky.

With his history of violence and rejection of political correctness, Kenny Powers seems like exactly the type of former sports star who Trump would love to have speak on his behalf at the GOP convention this month. But presented with the proposition, McBride says Powers would never endorse someone like Trump and prefer to mount his own campaign instead. I think hed want to challenge Trump, he says.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/12/danny-mcbride-on-vice-principals-and-whether-kenny-powers-would-back-trump.html

Continue Reading ..