Eastbound & Down Season 4

In a surprise announcement from Danny McBride and Jody Hill, HBO is said to have ordered 8 episodes for a Eastbound and Down season 4

UPDATE (June 7, 2013) - HBO announced that filming for Eastbound and Down season 4 began today in North Carolina. The new season premieres on Sunday September 29, 2013 at 10pm ET on HBO. 

Apart from Kenny Powers, the arrogant and extremely magnetic baseball pitcher and the leading character of “Eastbound & Down”, there appear to be some unexpected curveballs being thrown from HBO. The cable channel representatives have confirmed in a Variety report that Eastbound and Down season 4 has been ordered! The announcement of the new season of this hit show comes as a surprise being that season 3 had been reported as and surely seemed to be its finale this spring. 

Details of Eastbound and Down season 4 are scarce, and there is no word yet if Kenny would return to the pitching mound for the Myrtle Beach Mermen. The series appeared to be concluded at the end of season 3 on April 15th with the "death" of Kenny Powers. (Very strangely, the plotline was echoed in the broadcast of the final series of “House” on May 21^st.)

Over a telephone interview on Tuesday, McBride said, “I think this opportunity to do this one extra season – this bonus round with Kenny – creatively, we have the goods to deliver on that”. He also added, “It feels like there’s appetite from fans out there as well, that they wouldn’t be turned off by spending a little bit more time with him. At the end of the day, if HBO’s going to pay for us to go and have fun with this character, we still have the desire to explore this.”

The creator of the series along with Ben Best and Jody Hill, McBride sounded quite certain at the end of the series in March when he said in a panel discussion that neither he nor his collaborators have plans to go further than Season 3. He had said, “We never really had an interest in turning the show into anything traditional. We approach each season like its one long movie”.

Hill laughed and said “I wish large amounts of money was the answer” when he was asked on Tuesday about how many further episodes of Eastbound & Down possibly would be made. 

He also added, “We knew we had more stories to tell. We didn’t want to exactly let the cat out of the bag, but we didn’t want to have to come in and do anything that we didn’t want to do – have HBO come at us with a lot of new storylines, which we were afraid to do for a long time, so we always stuck to our guns. But HBO’s going to let us wrap things up the way we want to do it, so we figure more’s going to do it.”  

Without revealing much detail about plotline of Eastbound and Down Season 4 that may have 8 episodes, Hill said, “We realized there’s one more thing that Kenny needs to conquer. The family thing, Kenny still hasn’t faced his greatest obstacle with that.”

McBride also said that he and his collaborator Hill had the blueprints of “Eastbound & Down” since the very starting of the series in 2009. “But as we go and write the show, it becomes much richer and more textured than any of our initial ideas ever were. Every season we get crazy ideas – ‘if we get a third season we should definitely do this’ – and as we were doing the third season, we’d joke around, ‘If we ever did this again, we could do this.’ We feel happy with where we took things in the finale of the third season. HBO, they really were adamant, they really wanted more of this.”

Katy Mixon was present in the cast of the previous season of “Eastbound & Down” also there was Steve Little (as Stevie, Kenny’s worshipful best friend) accompanied with many guest stars such as Matthew McConaughey, Will Ferrell and Jason Sudeikis. (The Gray Sanchez Productions, the company of Adam McKay and Will Ferrell produced the series.) 

McBride also said that it was very unlikely for him, and his collaborators with the current commitments to start new episodes of Eastbound and Down Season 4 until “the latter half of next year.”

On the question of having Little and Mixon returning to Eastbound and Down Season 4 along with McBride,  “We haven’t confirmed exactly who’s coming back, but I think that’d be pretty good speculation” said Hill. We'll just have to wait and see how this all unfolds but Kenny Powers fans are sure to rejoice with this latest surprise announcement.