The Righteous Gemstones’s Redemption Song

Spoilers follow for all four seasons of The Righteous Gemstones, including series finale “That Man of God May Be Complete,” which premiered on HBO on May 4. 

Over four seasons of The Righteous Gemstones, viewers could rely on certain things: male full frontal, jokes about ass play, a moment of physical comedy from Edi Patterson’s petulant and petty Judy Gemstone that might cause your face to break from laughter. And, more and more as the show went on, sentiment. Because cliffhangers don’t really exist in the Danny McBride TV universe, instead, each season of Gemstones ended with an increasingly softhearted familial montage — a pattern that ultimately pushed the comedy away from its original satirical bent and morphed it into the most hopeful and tender series the unfailingly vulgar McBride has ever done.

In season one, braggadocious Jesse Gemstone (McBride) makes up with his blackmailing son Gideon (Skyler Gisondo) through missionary work in Haiti. Uncle Baby Billy’s (Walton Goggins) estranged son Harmon (Macaulay Culkin) rejoins the family for a church service at the end of season two. Season three’s conclusion includes a joyous picnic with another estranged branch of the family, including a relative who had for years planned to murder them all, as a spectral Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles) looks on approvingly. And in season four’s series finale, the wedding of youngest Gemstone Kelvin (Adam DeVine) and his long-term partner Keef (Tony Cavalero) is overseen by father Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), who realizes he’s ready to take another chance at love, too, with family friend Lori Milsap (Megan Mullally). As all the Gemstones celebrate Kelvin and Keef’s marriage and then move on with their successful personal and professional lives, we hear excerpts from a letter Aimee-Leigh wrote years before: “When we hold onto pain too tight, we lose the ability to grab the light. Sometimes grabbing that light feels impossible. So let go.”

Gemstones could never be described as a show that approved of mainstream megachurch Christianity, given how often the titular family and their associates attacked other religious leaders, embezzled money, did drugs, and insulted “poverty persons” while insisting upon their righteousness. But the series’s fascination with the prosperity doctrine and its detrimental consequences often felt secondary to a broader affection for its characters. They were selfish and megalomaniacal idiots, but they were our selfish and megalomaniacal idiots, the best of a bad bunch because of their vulnerability and care for each other, even if it took them deep into adulthood to realize hugging one another was okay. Amid the series’s recurring interest in a menagerie of American subcultures — professional wrestling, monster trucks, timeshare resorts — Gemstones’s most direct engagement with modern American Christianity was its encouragement of forgiveness and advocacy for second chances, even for people who didn’t earn either. McBride’s TV shows have always emphasized grace toward their messy male protagonists, but Gemstones’s unfailing willingness to let go of its characters’ sins meant that it lost some of its edge along the way.

When Gemstones premiered in 2019, it was a sharper-toothed show, more eager to present conservative, capitalist Christianity as an American disease, of which the Gemstone family is a symptom. Eli’s running small-time preachers out of Locust Grove to expand the Gemstones’ empire, Judy’s embezzled more than $1 million from the church, and Gideon’s blackmailing Jesse with a secretly taped video of his father doing cocaine, watching a married friend sleep with a sex worker, and basically being a hypocritical dumbass. Critics call the Gemstones “con men,” which seems to align with how Kelvin describes the family’s modern tactics: “All across America, capitalism’s crumbling. That’s when we step up, plant churches in shut-down big-box stores.” Uncle Baby Billy is even more explicit in describing the Gemstones’ relationship with God as he preaches in their new church, located inside a shut-down Sears, “A place you could buy slacks or some power tools … But now you can buy Jesus, amen.”

Gideon sees all that money as a corruptive force that’s wormed its way into his “total fucking fraud” father, Jesse, and hollowed out his family’s legacy. When the blackmailing scheme falls apart, Jesse apologizes for failing Gideon as a father and the pair make up and make good by digging water pipelines together in Haiti. But the Gemstones’ money-making machine keeps moving forward: Their megachurch remains popular, and Uncle Baby Billy is raking in dough by selling $60 drawings of what he claims to have seen in heaven after getting hit by lightning. The family was working on its relationships, and that was a good thing, but they were still drinking from a poisoned chalice.

Three years later, when Gemstones returned for season two, the show underwent a subtle but meaningful realignment in perspective. No longer were the Gemstones big bads punching down at “podunk ministers.” They were now more often in the sympathetic position of underdogs, a rejiggering that allowed McBride, Patterson, and DeVine to play the oppositional qualities of bombastic and pathetic rather than the more singular note of privileged wickedness. Against season two’s rock-star-like Lissons, McBride plays Jesse as grasping and lame, a mode in which he’s especially great when playing characters who want to be considered cool. In season three, the Gemstone kids were bitterly jealous of the Simkins siblings being orphans because they’re convinced it makes the rival preachers more likable. Various Gemstones got abducted and placed in mortal peril three times over the series’s run, including in season four, when Eli and Baby Billy are held hostage by Lori’s ex-husband, Cobb (Michael Rooker), and threatened with rape. Only every so often did the Gemstones engage in outright villainy again, like when they kill the Lissons (presented as justified, since they tried to kill the Gemstones first) or firebomb Vance Simkins’s new church (also arguably justified, since he was hatefully homophobic toward Kelvin).

“Nobody’s rooting for born-wealthy people to become more wealthy,” Jesse complains when comparing the Gemstones to the Simkinses, essentially capturing the series’s internal stakes. No longer was the show building season-long plots around how megachurch culture has helped turn modern-day Christianity into a hotbed of self-congratulation and greed; that was now subtext. Instead, Gemstones became a show whose primary interest in matters of faith was how far forgiveness can stretch, and the answer to that musing was always more, for both the Gemstones’ grasping elders and entitled kids. Eli breaks Kelvin’s thumbs: forgiven. Judy cheats on her husband, BJ: forgiven. Jesse tries to sabotage his wife Amber’s successful launch of the System, a marriage-counseling product that references their own intermittently troubled union: forgiven. Uncle Baby Billy nearly abandons his wife, Aunt Tiffany, and their two children because of his desire to become a TV mogul: forgiven. Nobody’s rooting for wealthy people to become more wealthy, but what Gemstones hoped we would do is find empathy for these people who are so often their own worst enemies.

What was always a marvel is how Gemstones managed to generate that compassion within the most consistently ludicrous comedy on TV. McBride, Patterson, and DeVine bit into any maximalism thrown their way and ripped it apart. There was euphoria in how the three tackled the show’s quirks, like the Gemstones’ propensity to add an s on the end of words that didn’t need it: “a Youtubes”; “We growns, Daddy”; telling their father they’re impressed he “can still do cums.” Goggins sprinted toward “the actor of his generation” accolades on the strength of the absolute insanity and physical gusto he brought to Uncle Baby Billy. The series had actual jokes, ludicrous physical-comedy situations, increasingly bold action sequences, banger songs, and an awareness of blocking’s importance in generating a laugh. A scene in “To Grieve Like the Rest of Men Who Have No Hope” in which Vance and Jesse are trying to big-dick each other, twirling their fingers self-importantly to direct the fellow members in the Cape and Pistol Society marching in a circle around them, is a perfect example of how delightfully stupid this series’s creative team could render the rituals of those who believe they’ve been chosen by God.

In using the Gemstones to explore the unflattering ways in which a faith can manifest in its followers, the series raised recurring questions that have been fundamental to McBride’s work in Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, too: If we’re certain that we’ve been chosen by God to be special, what mistakes can we get away with? (As Kenny Powers said of his comeback on Eastbound: “My story is the story of a raging Christ figure who tore himself off the cross and looked at the Romans, with blood in his eyes, and said, ‘My turn now, cocksuckers.’”) And if we’re convinced of our own specialness, how many times can we absolve ourselves of those mistakes? Season four’s opening flashback to murderer, faux-preacher, and Confederate conscriptee Elijah Gemstone (Bradley Cooper) explained the family’s ingrained tendency toward self-aggrandizement, but Gemstones ultimately extended Elijah the same grace it gives his modern-day descendants, sparing him from execution by the Union Army and granting him a second chance to become a true man of God. That arc is echoed in the finale’s feint toward killing the Gemstone kids, who then rebound into maintaining their prestige and power in connection with their church.

Compare that against how Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals at least gave their characters some repercussions, even if they were brief. In the former, Kenny Powers flees the country in shame and is later abandoned by his great love April. In the latter, Neal Gamby gets shot, and Lee Russell loses the support of the teachers he supervises. Kenny, Neal, and Lee also get happy endings — Kenny leaves the sports world and gets back together with April, Neal improves his relationship with his daughter, and Lee ends up running a store instead of a school — but their earlier setbacks are hard-earned lessons, and by the end of their respective series, all three men grew at least a small amount and realized their delusions of grandeur were just that. After that season-one blackmail attempt, though, Gemstones kept its characters unscathed and unhumbled, because what other choice did it have? Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin can survive being gunned down and left for dead because McBride and his co-writers like the Gemstones so much, yes, but also because you can’t punish people whose belief they’ve been ordained by God is buoyed by continued wealth and success.

The only way to treat characters like that, Gemstones decided, was to zoom in, to go so deep into the family psyche that the show stopped being a satire about Christianity and started being a portrait of grief. As BJ (Tim Baltz) says in season two, “It all just comes from hurt, though. Seems like maybe a Gemstone trait?” For all that’s been said about how Gemstones resembles Succession and its “Daddy” worship, or how McBride’s angry male protagonists reflect a certain kind of aggrieved man who’s convinced he deserves more, what got lost is how often his series’s internal tragedies are born out of his characters letting down their loved ones. When viewed through that lens, Gemstones becomes quite moving: Aimee-Leigh’s ghost is the family’s conscience, hovering around but unable to act; Eli and the Gemstone children are mourning not just the woman they lost, but the people they could have been if she were still alive. Are they cursed to be narcissistic because her influence is gone, and because they’ve inherited Eli’s appetite for power rather than her more pure faith? Would her influence have tempered their belief that their every act is approved by God?

Within that framing, Gemstones was a show about how grief never really leaves us and how lonely it can be to have everything you want but the one person you need. And it was a show about how sometimes, our faith in something bigger than ourselves, be it God or family, can provide the comfort money and power can’t. There’s a reason why the Gemstones’ prayer for Corey calms him as he dies in “That Man of God May Be Complete,” and it’s not because they’re rich; it’s because of the promise of redemption they’ve offered within it.