It's easy to use a T.V. show's host network's own confidence in that show as a marker to decide how seriously to take that show. Television monoliths like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or Westworld get every last frame scrutinized and analyzed as they are held on pedestals like the finest works of classic literature.
And in our ever more frenetic world each of us must decide which art we want to indulge in, since there's certainly more television produced than is worth our time to view. It's easy to overlook a show like Vice Principals, which compared to HBO's heavy hitters has a minuscule advertising campaign and could probably have the production of half its season paid for by one Thrones episode.
That would be to overlook one of the most subtly well-constructed programmes on the network, and a masterful new entry in that holy grail category I call the Intimate Epic.
These are pieces of literature (any medium) that tell grand stories of consequence (power exchange, life & death, sex) through only a tight lens on just a few characters. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly might be the ultimate in intimate epics: the story spans vast physical expanses, but more than that it's the impact of the characters' actions with one another that are immensely heightened, not necessarily because of what they are but because of how they're presented in the film.
What these guys are doing isn't all that important to anyone other than them, yet the way director Leone uses every cinematic tool available to display these events in the movie makes the audience feel like the consequences of the titular characters' actions shall be of universe-altering magnitude.
Kill Bill is another peak intimate epic, with the film bending us to believe that all of reality hinges on nothing but one person's hunt for five others. What happens at the end of the film is no surprise - it is given right in the title - but knowing that makes no difference. What makes Kill Bill riveting and immensely rewatchable is how it gets there. We get to see and hear moments of intense drama unfold between all these key players, events that reach across years and continents.
When our hero does finally kill Bill, a simple and low-key death becomes as climactic as the explosion of the Death Star because of everything we know about what led to it, and because we know how important it is to the main character. The world will still turn, wars will still be fought, and billion-dollar deals will still be struck tomorrow, but in Kill Bill that all completely ceases to matter as the film manages to shrink our perceptive scale of drama down to the intercourse of just a few people, and that is the essence of the Intimate Epic.
Vice Principals has tread some important new territory in this vein, and I hope this article can help establish it in the annals of great television-making that is worth your time in today's oversaturated tele-visual market. Principals brings several novel characters to the screen, such as the flirtatious but not-stellar-looking writer Brian Biehn and the batshit sociopath who's managed to remain functional thus far Lee Russell. About them and others an entire article could be written, but what I want to focus on here is the use of an ordinary, relatable, and - for those reasons - totally mundane setting in which the show occurs.
Previously I'd assumed part of what imbued an Intimate Epic with its epicness was certain qualities of the setting. It had to involve locations that commanded attention one way or another, perhaps being exotic (the Far East, jungles of South America, islands in the Caribbean), or exclusive and rarefied (Swiss chateaus, modernist houses overlooking sprawling cities, penthouses and boardrooms amid metropolises, government agencies or top-secret facilities), or simply unique in their extremity & beauty (vast deserts of the spaghetti Westerns, curving roadways along the Mediterranean, hostile mountains). Settings that were unusual immediately capture the viewer, saying "hey, this is not a regular place, the people that are here are doing special not-regular things."
Vice Principals dispenses all of that for a setting with none of those features. Instead the heightened importance of everything comes from the way it's shot, the way it's edited, the usage of music, and of course the writing itself. This is one of creator Jody Hill's calling cards, as evidenced from a similar style in Eastbound & Down. The cinematography, often coupled with slow motion, transforms high school hallways into backdrops for deceit, love, scorn, alliance, and betrayal. These two men are mid-grade losers working at an obscure suburban high school, yet as Vice Principals progresses they carry on as though the rise or fall of nations is at stake. Make no mistake: there are full-bore personalities at war here, and the show expands their conflict to fill our brains' scale of what a conflict, at its greatest, can be.
The final nail in the coffin is always the closing music and cut to the credits. Viewers are left, episode after episode, with the notion that something big has changed, something bigger is afoot, and whatever goes down not everyone will come out of it well. In short, the musical selections and perfect cutting at the show's conclusions haunt, and that is just about the finest thing that can be said for any piece of art.
This latest episode - the penultimate in the show's punchy run - leaves us with Neal Gamby and Amanda Snodgrass together again, as Miss Abbott looks onward, crushed, while the dreamy, spacey tunes of Roost's Big Black Delta play over everything. That final shot of her lingers just a little longer than you expect, and combined with a little hint they dropped a few episodes ago when she was shopping with Gamby, my money's on her as the shooter.
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