'Bob's Burgers' season four: Loren Bouchard talks plots, guests, more

Bob’s Burgers has already been renewed for a fifth season — which is exciting! But we’re still pumped about thisseason, which premieres Sunday.

To whet our appetites, we talked to showrunner Loren Bouchard and star H. Jon Benjamin about what plots, guests, and holiday-themed high jinks we can expect from the Fox comedy’s fourth year.

Let’s start with the premiere: “The family goes camping,” says Bouchard. “But it ends poorly for them.” Adds Benjamin, “Diarrhea is involved. But it’s in a river and disperses quickly. And there wasn’t a reservoir as far as I know, so no one drank it.”

Elsewhere in the season, Bouchard says “we have a Halloween episode we’re really excited about. The kids get trapped in a fort of their own making. The drama is, will they or won’t they make Halloween? And Molly Shannon plays this character called Millie, who has a kind of All About Eve relationship with Louise.”

Another episode, titled “My Big Fat Greek Bob,” will have Bob “fill in for a chef on vacation who cooks for a frat. The frat is somewhere between Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House. They’re not the best frat on campus, shall we say? Dana Snyder, Kurt Braunholer, and Hannibal Burress are some of the guest voices in that. And then Ken Jeong returns as Dr. Yap, who ends up being an alumnus of this frat. Jonathan Katz also guest-voices in the episode as the dean.”

In an episode called “Mazel Tina,” Jenny Slate returns as Tammy, Bouchard tells us. “She’s having a bat mitzvah and everybody’s invited except for Tina. So Tina manipulates her way in: Tammy’s out one caterer, and Tina suggests that Bob could do it.”

Other plots will include Linda reuniting her all-girl high-school band with her sister (Megan Mullally), a Thanksgiving whodunit where Bouchard says “someone keeps putting the turkey in the toilet,” and a Christmas episode featuring Bobcat Goldthwait as what Benjamin calls “your standard Christmas maniac.”

If the guest list already seems impressive to you, there’s much more where that came from, including return appearances from Bill Hader, Rob Huebel, Aziz Ansari as Darryl, and Will Forte as “a lothario plane pilot who gives flying lessons to bored housewives — including Linda.”

As for newcomers, “Michael Showalter plays a waiter on a wine train,” Bouchard says. “Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key are also both in multiple episodes. Keegan plays a male cheerleader in an episode called ‘Gene It On,’ in which Gene gets on the school cheerleading squad. And we first meet Jordan as a guy who works in a magic shop, but we’re going to see him again playing the girlfriend of Mr. Fishholder’s brother.”

“Fishholder’s brother — who’ll be played by Zach Galifianakis — will be in a big multiepisode arc,” Bouchard adds. “That’s going to come at the end of the season.”