The NBC sitcom AP Bio has found a new home on the network’s streaming site Peacock for its fourth season, and that’s good news for fans — and star Patton Oswalt.
The comedian, The Goldbergs narrator and Ratatouille voice-over star plays the principal of an Ohio high school at which Glenn Howerton‘s Jack is a teacher — and because Jack doesn’t want to be there, he often makes Principal Durbin’s life difficult.
But the back-and-forth between the two isn’t your typical Summer School “teacher-vs.-authority figure” trope, Patton says.
“I love playing an authority figure with no actual authority, which I think is how a lot of people — a parent, a manager at a Subway — like that’s…the position a lot of people are in, where you just don’t have the authority that you think you have,” he explains.
Adds Oswalt, “I just love…where there’s moments where it’s almost like Jack treats Durbin like a kid that you’re playing a board game with. And it’s like, ‘I’m just going to let him win, so that it can give him a little bit of confidence here,’ where he has to let him feel like, ‘Yes, Durbin, you stepped in and you fixed things.’ It’s such a sweet relationship.”
Their relationship certainly spices up this season, particularly in one episode that shows the pair like they’ve never been seen before.
“There is a whole episode where the students are shipping the various teachers and administrators and hooking them up in different combinations,” Oswalt notes, “but we see it acted out.”
He adds, laughing, “Not only do we shoot a romance scene, I think we kind of shot a Sergio Leone scene that turns into a romance. They went so far with this stuff, it was insane.”
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