“Eastbound and Down” certainly starts promisingly, with a flashback laying out the career of Kenny Powers, a major-league baseball player who has seen the highest heights one can reach in the sport, including cover stories for every magazine from Highlights to Cat Fancy to American Woodworker. “Everyone wanted a piece of my shit,” says Powers, in a voiceover, describing himself as a man with “an arm like a fucking cannon.” Unfortunately, as with so many athletes who get a taste of glory and then dive headlong into the trough, Powers’ ego expands to a size far larger than his home state of North Carolina. He begins to blame his failures on his team, so he leaves Atlanta, becomes a free agent, and starts a career freefall which seems him moving from New York (“You mean Jew York?”), Baltimore and San Francisco (“I gotta tell ya, I thought the blacks in Baltimore were bad, but it turns out they’re nothing compared to these fags they got in San Francisco”), Boston, and Seattle.

Seattle, however, proved too much for the man, and after proving directly responsible for the team’s devastating loss against Los Angeles, things fade to black for Powers, and after a caption which reads, “Several shitty years later,” he find that he’s now out of baseball and has carried his remaining belongings back home to the state known as North Kakalaki to work as a middle-school substitute teacher…and it’s at this point that feelings about “Eastbound and Down” will begin to vary wildly.

It’s one thing for Kenny Powers to have a massive ego when his situation in no way warrants having one. When he steps in front of a gym class for his first substituting gig and asks if there are any questions, someone wants to know if they’re going to have to run the mile, and he snaps, “I’m talking about me. These are questions about me personally as a superstar. You know, you’ve got this moment in time here with an American icon…and you’re going to waste it asking questions about the fucking mile?” Now, that’s funny. Even watching someone in a downward spiral can be funny if it’s done right…and the fact that Kenny’s the kind of guy who’s on the verge of bankruptcy yet refuses to sell his jet ski is indeed a funny character conceit. The problems with the fact that he’s constantly offering up comments which anyone would seem socially inappropriate and is totally oblivious to other people’s reactions to them…well, frankly, that gets old pretty quick.

There is potential for the show, however. Anyone who’s actually lived in or near North Carolina will very much recognize how real the show feels, both in dialogue and in its settings; Kenny Powers may be an exaggerated version of Carolina white trash, but…well, he ain’t that exaggerated. There’s a great scene where we meet one of Kenny’s old cronies, who proves to be a pharmaceutical connection and also used to be a roadie for Widespread Panic. The romantic triangle between Kenny, his ex-girlfriend (who’s one of the other teachers at the school and is played by the super-cute Katy Mixon), and her fiance (the school principal, played by Andrew Daly, late of “Mad TV”) is about as stereotypical-sitcom as it gets, but it’ll be interesting to see how the dynamic between Kenny and his brother’s family plays out. (In particular, I’m hoping we see his nephew’s growing terror of him play out.) And as has been widely reported, not only by me but by every other TV critic on the planet, Mr. Ferrell will be turning up in the very near future…but don’t go looking for him to pop up in tonight’s premiere. He won’t rear his head ’til Episode #2.

(I’m mildly surprised that HBO has only sent out a single episode of “Eastbound and Down” to critics, since they usually send out the entire season of their series for review, but in this case, I think it’s less because they’re afraid of the critical reception and more because they figure people will be more likely to tune in for the Ferrell footage if it hasn’t already been leaked onto YouTube. I can’t blame them for that. But this Will is hoping that that Will doesn’t turn out to be the only reason to stick with the show.)

“Eastbound and Down” is clearly not your typical HBO sitcom; nothing else on the network has ever been so unabashedly aimed at the fratboy crowd, and although the level of profanity isn’t quite on par with “Deadwood,” it feels far more gratuitous here. (Granted, the same argument would apply to both shows: “But that’s how they really talk!”) By the end of the first episode, the typical HBO viewer might wonder, “How are they going to find a way to redeem a guy who’s as unlikeable as Kenny Powers?” The average Will Ferrell / Adam McKay fan, however, will most likely be giggling and gleefully asking, “How much more stupid, fucked-up shit this dude is gonna do?” I have a really bad feeling that the latter group will find the overall series way more enjoyable than the former, but I’ll stick around at least through Ferrell’s appearance to see how things are progressing. If Kenny’s still just as unlikeable a guy by the end of Episode 2, however, I don’t know that how interested I’ll be in coming back for more.

HBO’s Sue Naegle was able to sum up the premise of “Eastbound and Down” in a single well-constructed sentence: the hilariously tragic story of Kenny Powers, a former major league pitcher whose bad-boy ways have him down and out and teaching phys ed. at his old middle school in North Carolina. As a man who’s spent his entire life within a 30-minute drive of the Tarheel State (though this is probably the first time I’ve ever referred to it as the Tarheel State), I admit to a certain affinity for the premise, particularly after hearing McBride talk about his reasons for doing the series.

“These guys both grew up in North Carolina,” McBride said, referring to his collaborators Jody Hill and
Ben Best, “and I grew up in Virginia, and we all met at film school down in North Carolina School of the Arts. We weren’t really happy with the way the South was portrayed in a lot of film and television. It seemed like it kind of stopped at the ‘Hee-Haw’ kind of deal, which is overalls and Billy Bob, so we kind of wanted to find new things to make fun of in the South.”

By McBride’s recollection, the show’s actual premise came about while he, Hill, and Best were “splitting a case of beer, thinking of cool TV shows. We came up with this show, and a few years later, we were lucky enough to meet Will (Ferrell) and Adam (McKay), and we pitched them the show. They seemed to think it was a good idea, and they asked us if we were big sports guys, if we were really into sports. And we told them that none of us had ever played any sports. I didn’t know how to throw a baseball! But when we write things, especially to act in, you kind of want to write something to kind of fulfill fantasies, and being, you know, semi-athletic has always been a fantasy of mine, and so this is a way to act that out.”

“People are always coming up to us and asking, ‘Oh, is it this guy or that guy?’ I mean, I guess that would have been a good idea, but we really don’t know anything about baseball,” admitted Hill.

“What we knew about baseball…you know, we had seen things in the headlines about different stars who had kind of fallen from grace, and that always, to us, seemed like an area that was ripe for the picking,” said McBride. “Here are these guys who are supposed to be national icons and should be heroes to children, and yet, you know, there’s guys getting busted for cheating or for using steroids or gambling. And to us, that just seemed like that could fall into what we like to play with.”

Ferrell and McKay serve as the show’s executive producers, and Ferrell appears in the first episode as car dealer Ashleigh Shafer, whose blond-maned look was intentionally influenced by legendary wrestler Ric Flair. The Ferrell / McKay connection came about as a result of the duo seeing McBride’s film, “The Foot Fist Way,” after its appearance at the Sundance Film Festival.

“We just sat down for a dinner with these guys, and we are big fans of theirs, so we were surprised that they had seen our film and then even more thrilled that they were willing to kind of get into business with us on it,” said McBride. “And we just instantly dug them a lot, and we also looked up to them, so the chance to work with them on something else was a no-brainer.”

“Eastbound and Down” is, according to McBride, structured to be a story of redemption, but that the redemption lies in his own hands. “He’s given many avenues to kind of redeem himself,” McBride explained, “and he kind of makes his own choices.”

“He’s in the moment that he could redeem himself, but he always chooses the path that would lead him further down,” said Best. “So I think in each episode he’s thinking, ‘This is the lowest a man can get,’ and then you’ll see it’s like, ‘Oh, no, wait, this is the lowest a man can get.’ And that will just continue.”

And, ladies, prepare yourself for a Danny McBride nude scene.

“I actually shot one of the episodes,” said McKay, “and one of the things few people know about Danny is he has a lovely, lovely body. A very furry and enjoyable body. And we shot pretty much 200,000 feet of film on his naked body, black-and-whites, step frame. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous body.”

“It is,” agreed McBride. “It’s great. But, uh, that wasn’t even for the project, Adam. That was just for us.”

Whoops.

“Eastbound and Down” premieres on HBO on February 15.