(NOTE LANGUAGE) NBC’s sitcom AP Bio just returned for a fourth season on Peacock.
The series stars It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia lead and co-creator Glenn Howerton as Jack Griffin, a former Harvard philosophy professor begrudgingly tasked with teaching at his hometown high school in Ohio.
Instead of teaching, however, he sets his students on a series of missions to get back at a fellow academic who stole his dream job.
The series was never a ratings hit for NBC, but it developed a dedicated core audience who successfully fought to save it season after season.
Howerton explains to ABC Audio that AP‘s creative trajectory is a blessing in disguise. “There is this little bit of sort of like a kamikaze pilot mentality where you’re like, ‘This might be it…So I’m just f***ing going for it, man.”
He adds, “You know…look, I experienced it on Sunny…in those early seasons especially, we were like ‘Nobody’s going [to watch] this. I don’t know if anybody’s really even getting what we’re doing. So let’s just do it.’ It’s like it’s almost like we’re doing it for ourselves, you know?…And then you find out that, like, lots of people are watching and lots of people do love it.”
Stand-up and actor Patton Oswalt, who plays the school’s hysterically powerless Principal Durbin, agrees that this season, they’re going for broke.
“We know our writing staff, we know how willing to push the envelope they are,” he says. “And so knowing that they have yet another season — on a streaming platform where they get even more wiggle room — it was just that anticipation of, ‘Oh, God, what are they going to send us? I cannot wait to read these scripts!'”
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