Danny McBride Says HBO Rejected Two ‘Eastbound & Down’ Spinoffs, Including A Will Ferrell-Led Ashley Schaeffer Series

The world of making television is a weird landscape and even odder when you have something of a hit on your hands, and expansions/spinoffs don’t get made despite that success. In the case of HBO‘s “Eastbound & Down,” Danny McBride (the funny man co-created the show with Ben Best and Jody Hill) recently revealed to Josh Horowitz this month on his fantastic industry chat podcast “Happy Sad Confused” that they had been trying to get two spinoffs off-the-ground at HBO with one featuring Ashley Schaeffer, Will Ferrell’s recurring BMW-dealer character on “Eastbound & Down,” who was had just as much of a foul-mouth on him as McBride’s Kenny Powers and at sometimes even more cringe.

“We talked to Will about doing an Ashley Schaefer spin-off a few years ago. But you know what? HBO didn’t even, like, listen to the pitch. They just weren’t interested in it,” McBride said of his failed Ferrell-led project not even getting to the pitch stage.

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What was the second one about? According to McBride, the project titled “Holy Guacamole” would have focused on Kenny’s sidekick Stevie (played by Steve Little), a fixture, wacky character throughout the show’s four-season run and one that consistently made McBride break during filming on multiple occasions.

“We had a spin-off idea after ‘Eastbound’ that was going to be called ‘Holy Guacamole,’ and it was Steve Little and his—Stevie and his wife open up a Mexican restaurant, and it was just going to be like a workplace comedy. And that, again, didn’t go anywhere. Again, they were not interested,” McBride said of his second spinoff idea that also got rejected by HBO.

Kind of wild that HBO would want to keep making projects with McBride with subsequent shows like “Vice Principals” and “The Righteous Gemstones,” but didn’t want to touch those aforementioned spinoffs. Maybe they didn’t want to take the risk of doing those without McBride’s direct participation and wanted to focus on other ideas.

On a more positive note, McBride has a big studio IP feature project in the works with a new “G.I. Joe” movie (an idea he cracked alongside “Righteous Gemstones” writers Jeff Fradley and John Carcieri ), and he’s hopeful it could get in front of cameras next year. Although we’re not entirely sold that Paramount Pictures is 100% going to make that happen in that time frame (they’ve reportedly hired Chris Hemsworth for a gestating “G.I. Joe” film that is likely to see him in the role of Chuckles and is a possible crossover with “Transformers“). Then again, stranger things have happened, and it would be kind of great to see one of these big studio tentpoles written by McBride.

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Anywho, you can listen to or watch that full exchange between Horowitz and McBride below.