'Vice Principals' Season 2 Trailer: Revenge Is In Session

HBO's Vice Principals is a brilliant comedy gem just waiting to be discovered by an audience that can appreciate it. Jody Hill and Danny McBride's evil, pitch-black and surprisingly soulful comedy series didn't leave much of an impression on pop culture at large when it debuted last year and that's a shame. This feels like the culmination of their work together, taking what they learned on The Foot-Fist Way and Eastbound & Down and polishing it to perfection.

For the already initiated, the first Vice Principals season 2 trailer is here. For everyone else (especially those with a taste for crude, unpleasant, and emotionally unsettling comedy): you have some homework to do.

If you didn't catch the first season, this teaser trailer isn't going to make much sense. However, if you did watch all nine episodes of season 1, you know exactly why Danny McBride's Neal Gamby is wearing war paint and vowing revenge. It's a big cliffhanger for a show not nearly enough people have watched yet, so let's just leave it at that for now.

While this teaser feels like it's made out of footage shot only for marketing purposes, this series has proven so strange and so wild that I wouldn't be surprised at all if this comes from an actual episode. You quickly learn to never expect anything traditional (or sane) from this show.

The first season of Vice Principals was built around a simple premise: two rival high school vice principals (McBride and the great Walton Goggins) decide to team up and destroy their school's new principal after they are both passed over for the job. Things start dark and only get darker as their war against their boss escalates from simple pranks to violent crimes. McBride's Neal Gamby struggles to maintain his tough guy exterior as things get increasingly out of hand. Goggins' Lee Russell reveals himself to be a stone-cold sociopath and a skilled monster.

Like Hill's other projects (including the astonishing and underrated Observe and Report), Vice Principals revels in bad behavior. But there's a dark conscience lurking underneath the surface of this show, a sense of unease that permeates the characters on the screen before trickling into the audience, enveloping you in their guilt and rage. This is a great show and you should be watching it.

In any case, it will be over soon. Vice Principals was always intended to be a two-season series and the next batch of episodes will bring the show to a definitive conclusion. As for what we can expect from the new season, McBride previously told Uproxx "we were channeling a lot of John Hughes and '80s teen comedy in the first season, and I feel like in the second season we start channeling a lot of Brian De Palma." As the kids say: I can't even. Bring it on.

Vice Principals season 2 premieres on September 17, 2017.