It was hard not to be skeptical about a fourth season of Eastbound & Down. The show was inconsistent through three seasons before ending with Kenny Powers leaving baseball and even faking his own death in order to be with the woman he loved. A fitting and fittingly over-the-top ending to a quirky HBO comedy about a redneck baseball player with a big ego. Or so we were told.
Season 4 picks up a few years down the road, long after "happily ever after." Kenny's wallowing in middle class suburbia, working a shit job and getting out-earned by his wife. He wears a tie and khakis. He listens to NPR. He keeps reminding himself that he "won," and that this is exactly what he wanted. But then one day he runs into an old teammate, now a major "sports network personality," and for the first time in years Kenny gets another taste of the world he left behind. The fame, the money, the drug-and-hooker-filled parties - and all of a sudden Kenny Powers is Kenny Powers again.
What follows is a neat little eight-episode epilogue of sorts, aptly able to stand alone as a one-season summary of the show and its main character. Eastbound & Down was always easy to dismiss as crass, crude, and too zany to be considered "good" television. But here, at the end of it all, I have to admit - I liked this fourth season when it aired, and I really liked binge-watching it again over the last twenty-four hours. There's a confidence here, in the acting, the editing, and the overall production, that quietly rises way above what you'd expect from a show with such deliberately tacky and low-class characters, conflicts, and environments. And there are real stakes for the characters here, too, amid all the cheap laughs.
I didn't think I'd miss Eastbound & Down, but re-watching these final eight episodes has reminded me what a great show it was, at least in the end.
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