I am – Hercules!!


A six-episode HBO comedy from the “Foot Fist Way” team of writer-director Jody Hill, screenwriter Ben Best and writer-actor Danny McBride, “East Bound And Down” follows a superstar major-league pitcher who finds himself reduced to serving a substitute gym coach.

Besides McBride (“Pineapple Express,” “Tropic Thunder”), the series stars John Hawkes (“Deadwood”), Jennifer Irwin (“Still Standing”), Katy Mixon (“Four Christmases”) and Andrew Daly (“Mad TV”).

“Noodleman,” an untested spy, says that at a recent screening he attended “the whole room was dying”:

Just saw the pilot for Eastbound and Down, the new HBO series starring Danny McBride (and exec produced by Will Ferrel). It's written partially by Jody Hill, who not only directed the pilot but also McBride's The Foot-Fist Way and the upcoming Observe and Report.

The thing HBO is really trying to drive home is that, with recent R-rated comedies like Superbad, Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, etc, they thought now would be the best time to get in the Will Ferrel business, and wanted to bring characters like you'd see in those films to the smaller screen.

They did a pretty fantastic job of it, too. The pilot, which was somewhere between 30-40 minutes, is laugh out loud hilarious from beginning to end. I'm personally pretty easy to please, but the whole room was dying, almost the whole time.

The show's about Kenny Powers (McBride), who was essentially an all star pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. But, he gets cocky, and as he gets cockier, he gets less talented-- By the end of the first five minutes, in a gut-busting montage of Powers' baseball career, we see the rise and fall of Powers, and he's fallen so far he's living with his brother, his sister in law, their three kids, and just got a job at his alma mater (I think) as the sub gym coach.

The way he speaks to people-- his family, his co workers, even the kids he's teaching, is consistently obscene, but he seems to get away with it mainly because of who he is, fallen idol or not.

A perk of working as a sub for Kenny is being around his high school sweetheart, but that falters when he discovers she's now engaged to the principal of the school, a dimwitted, naive guy who loves Kenny quite a bit.

The environment of the school is really quirky, which helps make it easier to swallow that a guy as abrasive and outrageous as Kenny Powers could get away with some of the things he does (which range from bad to abhorrent very quickly).

His ex girlfriend and his brother seem to be the central heart of the show, and I like it better that way, rather than try to tone Kenny down and make him sympathetic, which would be nearly impossible if they wanted to retain the humor.

Overall, it's definitely worth checking out, and with only 6 episodes ordered right now, I can't really forsee anyone starting the first episode and not wanting to keep up with it, just to see what fucked up thing Kenny does next (I can't even imagine, but the HBO guy promised there's some good stuff in store that even made him seem queasy).

If you use this, you can call me Noodleman.

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