This review contains spoilers for Season 3 of “The Righteous Gemstones.”
HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” comes roaring back June 18 with its car chases, pompadours, botched assaults and neon lights. The third season of the third series in what creator and star Danny McBride calls his “misunderstood angry man trilogy” steers the foul-mouthed Gemstone family — still squabbling for control of their predatory megachurch now that patriarch Eli (John Goodman) has retired — toward a number of minor but moving epiphanies.
While the show has dedicated plenty of time to the oddball escapades of Gemstone brothers Jesse (McBride) and Kelvin (Adam Devine), the new season turns its spotlight on the lone Gemstone daughter, Judy (Edi Patterson), as she struggles with newfound stardom and its temptations. Patterson is a standout in this cast of comic heavyweights, so it’s a particular pleasure to watch Judy — a brilliantly unappealing gem of a character — wrestling with challenges other than failure and exclusion. Viewers are also treated to an epic poolside number by Walton Goggins’ Uncle “Baby” Billy, Eli’s seedy brother-in-law, who feels his career has hit a rut. There’s some snake-handling, more passionate rollerblading by Judy’s husband BJ (Tim Baltz), and a gratifying amount of youngest son Kelvin’s devoted disciple Keefe (Tony Cavalero). The new additions are mostly terrific; they include Kristen Johnston and Steve Zahn, as well as Stephen Dorff, Iliza Shlesinger, and Stephen Schneider.
“The Righteous Gemstones” runs on outlandish set pieces, absurd but gripping action sequences, awkward invective and (crucially) clumsy love. This season disappoints on none of those fronts. The series builds scene after scene on the blustery pleasures of its characters’ inarticulacy and delivers a virtual dissertation on unwarranted bravado. (I may never stop thinking about a scene in which Patterson makes glorious, nontraditional use of her index finger.)
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That said, its main plot is easily the show’s weakest.
Maybe that’s inevitable. The challenging premise that made “Gemstones” so singular has congealed (or matured) into something more like a fun but goofy formula. Here’s how McBride explained the original idea to Vulture last year: “I think the inspiration for the series as it is now definitely came from exploring the villain in the traditional story. It just felt more rich to me, and the show kind of came alive. Imagine someone who is of faith who would try to take someone else out in order to have what they have.” That’s an ambitious premise; sort of an antihero show folded up against itself. A “Dixie Mafia crime story,” as McBride put it in an interview with GQ.
But three seasons in, the show doesn’t seem especially conflicted about its heroes. The execution is quite a bit simpler: In this universe there will always be pleasing pomp, foolish grudges and a colorful, slightly implausible villain working against the Gemstones.
The season opens with a flashback to an adolescent Jesse (played by the eerily charismatic J. Gaven Wilde) preaching up a storm in an arena at a county fair as a monster truck called the Redeemer crushes cars. “We can be the monster truck!” Jesse yells as the crowd goes wild. “We can smush the things the devil puts in our way!”
While Jesse’s father Eli gingerly approves — butts in seats, he says — his saintly wife, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), is horrified. Sporting a jumper with a fetching watermelon-themed collar, Aimee-Leigh suggests that some things matter more than money. She is subsequently attacked and nearly killed by an enraged victim of the latest Gemstone swindle, which consists (we will learn) of prepper kits the family marketed to the faithful in anticipation of Y2K, a.k.a the end times. “You’re nothing but a phony pretending on TV to be all kind and caring, but I know the truth. Damn you to hell, Aimee-Leigh!” the attacker says, before striking.
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This is how the Montgomery family, the new season’s antagonists, are introduced, with Johnson playing Eli’s sister May-May and Zahn playing her estranged husband, Peter, who now runs a survivalist militia with sons Carl and Chuck (Robert Oberst and Lukas Haas).
Share this articleShareThe attack is a perfectly serviceable horror sequence. But given the season’s arc (critics received all nine episodes), it feels a tad cheap. The Montgomeries eventually acquire some depth by virtue of their connection to the Gemstones. And it seems unthinkable in hindsight that May-May would try to murder her sister-in-law. But that chase scene — and the fact that it targets the one “nice” person in the family — functionally turns the Gemstones (the swindlers, in this case) into the victims.
This is creaky stuff. You can practically feel the show straining to deprive the people the family cheated of any clear moral high ground; they portray them as crazy and unreasonable while the Gemstones behave (by comparison) rather decently. (Eli offers to return the money they lost, but they nastily reject the offer.)
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It sometimes feels like the plotting gets mired in a peculiar arms race to the bottom, morally speaking; it has to muster increasingly zany, irrational or evil antagonists for the Gemstone family to square off against in a way that keeps you — despite the family’s many misdeeds — on their side.
It may be, in other words, that “Gemstones” is caught in a gentle trap of its own making. For all its shock-jock trappings, this has always basically been a feel-good show, committed to rescuing its protagonists from harsh judgments and supplying them with lightly redeeming arcs. Bigotry, homophobia and sexism are kept mostly offstage (or refuted altogether, as when a confused but well-meaning Jesse lovingly “accepted” his straight son’s homosexuality). The comedy has a pattern: bluster, defensiveness and assault are usually followed by redemption, if not outright victory. The Gemstones’ enemies must either lose or reconcile with them. And though it would be a stretch to say the siblings grow, it’s true that they pretty much always win and that we, the viewers, want them to.
“These are not people of God!” Peter Montgomery yells at one point of the Gemstones. “They’re entertainers! Performers! Charlatans!” He’s right, of course, but he’s saying this as a cult leader. Jesse is right, too, when he dismisses the militia members as “super relig” rubes too attached to their guns. The joke in both cases is a basically kind one; it resides in the baseline similarities between these warring factions. (That they are not so similar; that Peter, in particular, spent years impoverished and imprisoned, while the Gemstones profited from the suffering of families like his, disappears in this sweet but shallow equivalence.)
Underneath the swearing and frontal nudity and violence, in other words, “Gemstones” shares far more with “Ted Lasso” and its ilk than it does with structurally similar dynastic satires like “Succession.” The show’s main commitment is to humor — quite rightly — but it’s also sentimental to a fault, so staunchly loyal to its principals that its parodies turn toothless and its plots sometimes buckle under the strain of insisting that the money-grubbing, peacocking televangelists do harm and that within every Gemstone there beats a heart of gold.
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This won’t matter to “Gemstones” fans, and perhaps it shouldn’t (it’s not like the “cycle ninjas” last season made much sense, either; plot has never been the comedy’s strong point). Maybe McBride is more of a New Testament creator, so happy to let redemption creep in through the cracks that he’s content to forgive and forget his creatures’ misdeeds. “The Righteous Gemstones” was never the kind of satire that bites, and if the series loves its impulsive, dysfunctional millionaires too much to ever let the weight of their sins be felt, at least the burden — while light — is hilarious.
The Righteous Gemstones, Season 3, premieres Sunday, June 18, with two new episodes. New episodes drop weekly.
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