Danny McBride Addresses Eastbound & Down Season 5 Potential & HBO Spinoff Series Pitches 13 Years Later

The past is the past as far as Danny McBride is concerned.

In the long-ago world of 2009-2013, McBride became a TV comedy legend, starring as hilariously over-confident and hopelessly washed-up former major league pitcher Kenny Powers on HBO’s raucous Eastbound & Down. In the present, McBride is a writer, producer and performer renowned for his work on the Halloween reboot trilogy, and on HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, and he seems anything but eager to grow out his mullet and return to the fictional mound.

“I have never really entertained it because to me it feels like we did do it, and I wonder what we would have to gain by doing it again,” the one-time Kenny Powers actor said recently when asked about coming back for Eastbound & Down season 5 (via Happy Sad Confused). The show co-creator and star then explained how things have changed for him and his team in the 13 years since the baseball comedy left HBO.

“Ultimately, we didn’t give a s–t back then,” he said. “We didn’t have kids. None of us were married. We didn’t even really know how the world worked. So there was a fearlessness to what we were creating, and I love that that is what it is.” He went on, “I’ll still push things now and I like it, but part of me wonders if going back into that world now would actually make it better or if it would somehow taint it. It kind of feels like the idea would be to do something new as opposed to just go wallow in the past.”

McBride’s current reluctance to re-visit past glories doesn’t mean he never had an idea for how to keep alive the spirit of Eastbound & Down even without Kenny Powers as the main character. “The closest we came was, we talked to Will [Ferrell] about doing an Ashley Schaefer spin-off a few years ago,” he said when addressing show concepts that didn’t go anywhere. “But you know what? HBO didn’t even listen to the pitch. They just weren’t interested in it. I was like, ‘All right, it sounds like it could be awesome.’ … Maybe they’re right. Maybe it would just be too much uh lunacy for one show.”

Another brainstorm revolved around the Eastbound & Down character of Stevie. “We had a spin-off idea after Eastbound that was going to be called Holy Guacamole, and it was Steve Little and his wife open up a Mexican restaurant, and it was just going to be a workplace comedy. Again, [HBO] were not interested.”