Vice Principals Review

Vice Principals is the most divisive thing McBride and Hill have made, and the split is easy to locate. The first season is nine episodes of two grown men behaving so badly that a large share of critics simply refused it, calling the cruelty aimless and the humor crude for its own sake. The second season, planned from the start as the back half of one story, is where the design shows: the conspiracy collapses, the consequences arrive, and Neal Gamby is pushed toward something close to self knowledge.

Reviewers who stayed found it much stronger. What nobody disputes is the acting, which is why that axis sits well above the overall. McBride plays Gamby as a small man with a wound, Walton Goggins gives Lee Russell a controlled venom that is the reason to watch, and Kimberly Hebert Gregory as the principal they target is superb and badly underused. David Gordon Green directs several episodes and the show looks better than the genre needs. It is a comedy about resentment too pleased with its own nastiness, and then, twice a season, genuinely brilliant.