Eastbound and Down comes back — hard

For those with an affinity for white-boy cornrows and self-important ex-baseball players, the long-awaited second season of HBO’s Eastbound & Down has finally arrived.

Sunday night marked the premiere of the first episode of season two and with a foreign locale and a batch of new characters, it’s already shaping up to be another bout of Kenny Powers-filled hilarity.

When last season left off, main character Kenny (played by Danny McBride) — a foul-mouthed, mulleted former famous MLB pitcher — had worn out his welcome in his hometown in North Carolina, where he moved after losing his pitching contract. After getting a job at his old elementary school and reconnecting with his ex-girlfriend April (Katy Mixon), Powers spends the majority of the episodes fighting his own overexaggerated arrogance and struggling with the terms that his professional sports career might very well be over. He alienates those around him and, in the final scene of the first season, ditches April at a gas station and drives into the proverbial sunset.

Enter Mexico, the second season’s new foreign locale. Hiding from the embarrassment back home, the first episode finds Kenny south of the border with a new life of cock fighting and Mexican baseball.

The show’s second season marks a new era for HBO, a channel whose recent comedy exports have had trouble sticking it out for another year. It also denotes an HBO hit for Will Ferrell, whose production company makes Eastbound & Down. Amid all of the primetime comedy premieres in the last few weeks — The Office, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 30 Rock — it’s a feat that Eastbound even made a buzz, but with an angry, obnoxious character like Kenny at the helm and a whole new country full of people for him to offend, the new season is set to be as raucous as the last.