The Righteous Gemstones Goes Out in a Blaze of Glory

With its fourth and final season, Danny McBride’s The Righteous Gemstones goes out as it lived: as a riotously funny, resolutely filthy satire of televangelism, the evangelical movement, and the corruptive influence of power and money. 

McBride, a native Southerner who would’ve been a kid when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were defrauding the viewers of The PTL Club, has starred in and co-created three consecutive HBO comedies set in ridiculous yet recognizable versions of the modern South. As great as Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals were, Gemstones has been his epic—his funniest and most sprawling work, and also the one that says the most about both the South and American culture in general. (Because there is more to America than the South, I guess.) He’s always viewed the Gemstones, the titular family of televangelists, as a crime family, and Season 4 continues the show’s tradition of having a season-long arc that’s basically a kind of gang war, with family—or friends who are like kin—trying to elbow into the Gemstones’ racket. It might be hard to imagine enough people falling for the Gemstones’ transparent hypocrisy and insincerity to fund their outrageous, ostentatious lifestyles, unless you’ve also had family members fall prey to false prophets like Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, and Jerry Falwell, or modern analogues like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar. You didn’t have to grow up in a house with more than one of Tammy Faye’s weird puppet records to really understand The Righteous Gemstones, but it certainly helps. 

This season’s main arc introduces the Millsaps, lifelong family friends of the Gemstones whose matriarch, Lori, was Aimee-Leigh Gemstone’s best friend and musical collaborator. Megan Mullally plays Millsap as a well-meaning, down-home country and gospel singer entering her senior years, while an uncharacteristically subdued Seann William Scott plays her son Corey, who’s basically like a cousin to Jesse, Judy and Kelvin Gemstone. Mullally hints at just enough of a dark side to put Lori’s true intentions at question, and Corey’s blankness and obvious desire to basically be a Gemstone (I mean, he just wants to rip as well as they do; can you blame him?) similarly make him suspicious. The true history of their relationship with the Gemstones doesn’t become clear until late in the season, and that guessing game maintains a level of tension and intrigue that’ll be familiar to anybody who’s ever watched this show before. And as central to this season as that storyline is, ultimately, as in previous seasons, it’s secondary to what’s really important here: the funniest stuff you’ll see on TV.

Gemstones’ greatest calling card has always been its immaculate cast, and unsurprisingly that’s still true in Season 4. McBride, Edi Patterson, and Adam DeVine remain a tight trio of comic virtuosos as the Gemstone children Jesse, Judy and Kelvin, playing off each other perfectly while also carrying their own individual storylines throughout the season. John Goodman brings gravitas to the quiet exasperation of their father Eli, who’d rather just hang out on his houseboat in Florida, growing his hair long and hooking up with local barflies, than deal with the family or its business anymore. And the Gemstones’ children’s partners—Cassidy Freeman as Jesse’s wife Amber, Tim Baltz as Judy’s husband BJ, and Tony Cavalero as Kelvin’s finally official boyfriend Keefe—are each as crucial as the Gemstone kids themselves. And to nobody’s surprise Walton Goggins (who’s also currently starring in another HBO series, the third season of The White Lotus) steals every scene he’s in as Aimee-Leigh’s brother Baby Billy, who aims to become a regular Stephen J. Cannell of Christian TV after the success of his game show Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers.

A major theme through all of McBride’s work is its interrogation of masculinity, and how it regularly drives men to act in absurd, unhealthy, and embarrassing ways. The Righteous Gemstones has always addressed this in a multifaceted and surprisingly nuanced fashion. Jesse’s idiotic swagger represents a stereotypical strand of American masculinity, one that’s brutish, mean, and ugly—one that took the exact wrong lessons from Burt Reynolds’ filmography, basically—and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to note that he doesn’t show much more growth in Season 4 than he did throughout the first three seasons. If McBride’s character is all comic relief bluster, DeVine, Cavalero, and Baltz are there to show different shades of what it means to be a man, without resorting to lazy, demeaning stereotypes or losing sight of comedy. BJ’s absolute confidence in his non-traditional masculinity plays as a sensitive, quietly progressive response to Jesse, but is also a perfect foil to his wife Judy’s raunchy, almost grotesque idea of sexuality. Kelvin and Keefe, meanwhile, have opened a new offshoot of the family ministry that welcomes believers of all genders and orientations; although they can come close to antiquated parodies of homosexuality, Kelvin and Keefe being gay is never the target of any joke—and in fact they have the healthiest and most respectful relationship of anybody in the family. Between Jesse, BJ, Kelvin, Keefe, Jesse’s sons Pontius (Kelton DuMont) and Gideon (the always likable Skyler Gisondo), and Judy—who, honestly, is the most masculine member of the family in many ways—The Righteous Gemstones mines the rich emotional minefield of modern manhood for its most potent and prescient comedy. 

And then there are the old dogs. Goodman has always effortlessly grounded Eli’s televangelist charlatanism in a hidden streak of fundamental decency, and that comes to the fore now that he’s fully out of the game. It’s legitimately a bummer to see beach bum Eli dragged back to the Gemstone compound in South Carolina, but every scene Goodman shares with Mullally is a treasure—even the rare ones when they’re not 69ing each other. And Goggins once again makes Baby Billy all wiry energy and nervy chaos, still with a massive chip on his shoulder despite the apparent success of his utterly ridiculous (and ridiculously funny) Christian game show. You’ll see way more of Baby Billy than you’d ever expect to this season, with his natural combo of extreme arrogance and deep insecurity driving him to replace the lead actor in his new TV series about a teenage Jesus (called Teenjus, in a typical bit of Baby Billy nonsense that somehow kind of makes sense). Billy remains perhaps the most sublime comic performance of the era—an absolute real-life cartoon that is still, somehow, deeply realistic and familiar to anybody from the South. 

I don’t want to discount this season’s stories. One subplot, about Kelvin competing against last season’s villain Vance Simkins (Stephen Dorff) in the annual Top Christ-Following Man Awards, acts as a catalyst for Kelvin to finally, officially come out to the public, and although the general acceptance of Kelvin’s queerness sadly feels out of step with how society has turned over the last few months, it’s a needed little bit of uplifting optimism during a troubled time. But the strength of The Righteous Gemstones has always been its characters and the top-to-bottom perfect performances of its exemplary cast. That’s still true with this final season, even as it builds to a thrilling but stressful conclusion that almost turns into a Southern-fried Grand Guignol. On the way there we get nine last episodes with these characters and this world, with at least one major Hollywood cameo along the way; cherish it all while you can. Even if McBride and his regular collaborators Jody Hill and David Gordon Green return to HBO with another Carolina-set comedy within the next few years, I don’t know if we’ll see another show as wonderful as The Righteous Gemstones anytime soon. 

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

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