Rescuing the freshman show from the… something… of extinction, HBO has announced that it’ll be giving its Jack Black and Tim Robbins-starring dark comedy The Brink a second season of bumbling, barely averted self-destruction. The news comes just a day before the cast’s options were set to expire, an outcome that might have sent the show over the edge-thingy toward cancellation.
Currently halfway through airing its first season on the premium network, The Brink follows three characters—Robbins as a smug secretary of state, Black as a doltish State Department official, and The Wire’s Pablo Schreiber as a drug-addled fighter pilot—as they try to avert a nuclear war. The renewal notice seems to imply that they’ll be at least marginally successful in their goal of eschatological delay, since it’s pretty hard to have a show about stopping a nuclear war once one has already broken out. (That, or the first season will end with the nukes falling, and the next season will be a crossover with Fox’s The Last Man On Earth, with Black and Robbins fighting Will Forte over the rapidly escalating “mineshaft gap.”