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Vice Principals Recap: Lady Vengeance
Vice Principals
A Compassionate Man
Season 2 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating 5 stars *****
Photo: HBO
There’s a certain amount of romanticism in a group of words like “here’s to never growing up,” but when Lee Russell sings it, it lands less enjoy an affirmation of animation and more like a punch in the gut. For men like Russell and Gamby, never growing up means never adjusting their horrid behavior and never facing the consequences for it. This week’s episode sees decades-old repercussions come home to roost, but Vice Principals isn’t the kind of display to let us off so easy. It’s too true to life for that. Revenge may undergo good, but it always comes at some personal cost.
The clock starts ticking as soon as the episode opens. The catalyst is Kevin Yoon (Keong Sim), Christine’s college partner, who interrupts Russell and Christine as they’re out to dinner. Christine and Kevin are thrilled to see each other, but Lee looks like he’s seen a ghost, going so far as to say that Christine doesn’t have Facebook when Kevin says they ought to connect. His odd conduct doesn’t escape Christine’s perceive, and on the vehicle ride home
Both vice principals fast lose out on the job to Dr. Belinda Brown, a hyper-competent inky woman played by Kimberly Hebert Gregory. The former rivals work together to get her fired, using their hatred as the foundation of a affair that grows beyond a shared interest in sabotage. Over the first six episodes, Gamby and Russell’s bond deepens significantly, reaching the equivalent of the “I love you” overcome of the standard rom-com. (I was reminded of the Arrested Development episode where G.O.B. and magician Tony Wonder sleep together out of confusion and desperation because they’re incapable of telling the difference between genuine emotional connection and sexual attraction.) Neither of these men has any idea of how to relate to the other without aggression, and Vice Principals becomes a meditation—with poop jokes—on male heterosexual desire.
Between Men, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s pioneering 1985 study of homosocial want in 19th century literature, argues that male-male wish in any form has to be routed through a woman for whom neither of the men has any real need, thereby maintaining and supporting patriarchal power structures. Sedgwick’s fingerprints ar
Promoted to Control?
Abstract
HBO’s Vice Principals (2016–17) does not execute the magic of entertaining while also providing meaningful, well-thought-out critiques of toxic masculinity and crude educational philosophies. Instead, the show depicts male school administrators who pull every trick, deed, and word to undermine the woman who gets the job they longing. I argue that the series does not carry out its work in great faith but rather irresponsibly plays out, for laughs, damaging representations of the education system that abandon its audience primed to believe that the actual system is, too, a big, damaged joke. Yet, I could not pen about this show without highlighting the aspect that almost redeems it. This is Dr. Belinda Brown, the principal. Dr. Brown is rare onscreen and in real life—she is an African-American woman chief, and she does not fit into any of the three main categories we see in onscreen principals, all reductive to draw on easily packaged conflict: the buffoon, the autocrat, or the bureaucrat. Dr. Brown falls into what Mary M. Dalton terms “principal as loving pragmatist,” a principal who is written as
You expect a certain amount of chaos when Jody Hill or Danny McBride are involved in a show. Eastbound & Down spent four years shocking viewers with moments that were still perfectly in keeping with its planet and characters. Hill’s feature Observe and Report (with Seth Rogen in a role that could own easily been played by McBride) might be the darkest and most daring major studio comedy of the last decade or so. Vice Principals, their new HBO sitcom, fully embraces that chaos as it depicts the unintentional rage and resentment that has steadily risen within a certain segment of white men over the years, and even though last night’s episode “A Trusty Steed’ was only the show’s second, it’s already hit a more frenzied peak than perhaps anything the two possess ever done before. That chaos can be incredibly uncomfortable to watch, even as it makes us laugh, and last bedtime might be the most uncomfortable sitcom episode I’ve ever seen. Here are the five main reasons why.
1. Gamby and Russell Literally Destroy Dr. Brown’s House
It’s already a petty weird when Lee Russell (Walton Goggins) convinces his fellow vice principal Neal Gamby (McBride) to leave dig through the trash of Dr
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