It is interesting because it gives some insight to this modern-day Southern sensibility that's a little hard to pin down. It obviously lends itself to comedy, but you really made Neal Gamby into a three-dimensional character. He's got some really terrible tendencies, but there might be a good heart down there that's hidden beneath his shittier qualities. How do you manage to get all of that into your character in a 30-minute show?
I think it comes down to how hard we work on these scripts and how hard we work to make our characters and their worlds three-dimensional. It's very easy in comedy to take a bunch of personality types and give an audience two-dimensional characters and throw in a bunch of punchlines. We liked the idea of doing a show where it seemed like you were going to get a bunch of broad charactersbut then doing the unexpected and finding depth in every episode.
Right, it sort of feels like you pulled the rug out from under the audience a bit.
We were really conscious of that. Jody and I are both bored with the current state of comedy. It's so tough to make any edgy comedies these dayspeople do not show up for them. You can make a superhero movie and make $120 million in a weekend, and then a really good comedy will pull in about $20 million. It just seems like to me that's not the place right now to push the boundaries of comedypeople go to theaters for the expected and for comedies that play it safe. The format of television lets us fuck with the audience's expectations. That's what we liked about this: That people would tune into Episode One and think they know what it's going to be, and then they'll continue and see the slow growth form. It was fun to plot something out that way without following the usual guidelines.
On paper, the premise of Vice Principals is, for lack of a better word, pretty problematicyou have these two middle-aged white guys trying to destroy the career and life of a black woman. They're not heroes in any way. Yet you see some tendencies in your character in which he might be questioning how far he's taking things, the venom with which he's attacking her.
When we came up with the idea for the story, it was completely about figuring out how to do something people had never seen beforesomething unexpected. Audiences are so fucking smartthey can see things coming from a mile away. On this show, you're not following the heroes. You're following the villains. People might feel like they're rooting for these guys only because they're being presented as the guys you're supposed to root for. But each thing you see them do, it makes you question why you could ever root for them. I think that makes it more interesting.
These two guys are taking this principal job as seriously as anyone on Game of Thrones fighting for the Iron Throne. [Laughs] Yet they're in this small, suburban setting and they're pushing themselves to such extremes, all for this position that they think will solve everything that's wrong in their lives. Ultimately, the show is a tragedy presented as a comedy.
I think one of the funniest things about the show is how these two are so obsessed with maintaining their powereven though they don't really have any to begin with.
A lot of it has to do with how far people will go in order to win. These guys break laws, they do these heinous actsall in the pursuit of this one job. But all of the characters do things they probably shouldn't in order to get what they want. Even Belinda, moving her kids to South Carolina to get back at her husband. We all compromise our better judgment for the things we think we deserve.