I’m trying very, very hard not to get too excited for Anchorman: The Legend Continues because of the considerable risk of disappointment I’m running, but the first full-length trailer for the movie is absolutely not helping my efforts to contain my enthusiasm:

Ferrell, for all that he’s a big, loud goof in a lot of his comedy, is an actor with a great deal of interest moments when American culture is shifting in some significant way, particularly when he’s collaborating with Adam McKay, as he did on the original Anchorman, the underrated Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. If Anchorman was about the arrival of women not just in the workforce but in occupations that men believed to be specifically reserved for them as a result of their maleness, it looks like Anchorman: The Legend Continues has an equally good idea. It’s going to explore what happens when someone like Burgundy, whose ego was healthy enough when he worked in local news, goes national, and what happens when broadcast news, which in Anchorman was padded out with panda pregnancy watches and cat fashion shows, goes from hour-long slots to round-the-clock coverage. That’s an incredibly rich area for critique, and I can’t wait to see what happens when the news team has to fill that much programming, how Ron will react when he meets a rival anchor with better hair in the form of James Marsden, and whether it’s possible for him to destroy race relations in America in a single dinner.

When we got word that Anchorman 2 was finally happening, I wondered if the second movie would be as awesomely feminist as the first. Empire Magazine interviewed director Adam McKay, and while he says the script isn’t even close to done, the movie will tackle an entirely different kind of diversity:

So what will the sequel have in store for Ron and the team? Nothing good – at least, not if you’re a luxuriously-maned, change-averse ’70s sex dinosaur. “We know these guys never deal well with change,” says McKay, “and the good thing is that there’s a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We’re going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they’re not going to handle it well.”

So what does that sinister-sounding “regular timeline” mean for KVWN-TV? “It’s right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in ’78 or ’79,” McKay explains. “All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you’re talking about diversity and the Action News team, that’s always fun to deal with.”

That delights this progressive’s heart (it should be noted that McKay is a staunch progressive whose side project involves supporting liberal political songwriting). And it’s also a chance to riff off the utter genius of the news team rumble from the first movie, which remains an incredibly witty explication of weapons preference, if not the world’s best piece of fight choreography:

I really hope they can get Tim Robbins back as the leader of the public news team. But it would be nice if they didn’t have Ben Stiller pretend to be Latino.