2019 - 2025
HBO, 2019 to 2025. Four seasons, created by and starring Danny McBride, co-directed with Jody Hill and David Gordon Green. This is the "Rough House" team behind Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones is the third and final chapter of their HBO run. If you liked the first two, you already know what you are in for. If you didn't, this one might still get you, because it is the biggest and most ambitious thing the trio has made.
The Gemstones are a family of fabulously wealthy Southern televangelists running a megachurch empire from a gated multi-million-dollar compound. Patriarch Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) founded the ministry with his late wife, still preaches when the cameras demand it, and otherwise runs the business like a CEO who happens to wear a lapel cross. His three adult kids are all in the family trade, all spectacularly ill-suited to it, and all terrified of being cut off. That is the engine. Everything else is dressing.
John Goodman anchors the whole operation as Eli. Goodman has done a lot of great work across fifty years, and his Eli is up there with the best of it. A man who built a fortune on scripture and genuinely believes most of it, and who has no idea how to father the three spoiled adults he accidentally raised.
The three Gemstone kids are the show's comic engine.
Then there is Walton Goggins as cousin Baby Billy Freeman, a disgraced televangelist turned ageing showman in a toupée, always one grift away from a comeback. Goggins has been a great character actor for decades, and Baby Billy is the best thing he has ever done. I mean that. He walks off with every scene, sings the theme tunes, and somehow remains sympathetic through behaviour that would get a real person arrested.
Cassidy Freeman plays Jesse's wife Amber, holding the family together by sheer force of composure. Tim Baltz is BJ, Judy's hapless roller-skating husband, and turns what could have been a one-note joke into something genuinely loveable. Skyler Gisondo is Gideon, Jesse's reluctantly-returning stuntman son.
Dermot Mulroney
Recurring guest
Danny McBride
Jesse Gemstone
Adam DeVine
Kelvin Gemstone
Cassidy Freeman
Amber Gemstone
Walton Goggins
Baby Billy Freeman
Steve Zahn
Guest star
Macaulay Culkin
Guest star
Tim Baltz
BJ
The guest bench is absurd. Jason Schwartzman, Dermot Mulroney, Eric Roberts, Eric André, Steve Zahn, Tom Lenk, Macaulay Culkin, Bradley Cooper, Sturgill Simpson. People clearly want to be in this show, and you can see why.
On the surface this is a satire of American megachurch culture, and it is a sharp one. The motorcades. The private jets. The stadium-sized sanctuaries. The merchandise. The politely ignored gap between Jesus of Nazareth and a man in an earpiece selling a prayer hotline. The Righteous Gemstones has all that and it is not pulling punches.
But the satire only works because the show is not contemptuous of the people inside it. The Gemstones are awful. The show loves them anyway. That is the crucial register, and it is where a lesser writer would have collapsed into cheap dismissal of Southern evangelical culture. McBride grew up around this world and it shows. The critique is real, but the affection is real too.
Beneath the jokes there is a surprisingly serious theological pulse. Questions about what faith is for when the building costs forty million dollars. Whether a family can be redeemed. Whether grace extends to people who have stopped deserving it. The show does not offer tidy answers, but it asks the questions with more weight than a comedy about a televangelist getting blackmailed has any right to carry.
Underneath the farce is an extremely well-constructed family drama. Siblings circling each other for parental approval decades after it stopped mattering. A patriarch confronting his own mortality and wondering what he actually built. Marriages, grudges, rivalries, the weight of an inheritance nobody is quite ready for. If you stripped out the jokes you would have a minor Succession. Which is why comparisons to that show are not lazy.
The show looks expensive because HBO paid for it to look expensive. Mansions. Motorbikes. Concerts. Helicopters. Private islands. There is a deliberate maximalism to the visual grammar, because the whole world of the show is built on excess, and the camera matches that energy. Jody Hill and David Gordon Green have been directing McBride for twenty years now, and the three of them share a visual language. Wide compositions, deadpan framing, unexpectedly gorgeous countryside photography slammed into gross-out comedy.
The writing room is small and tight, and the dialogue rhythm is specific. Long pauses. Absurdist escalations. Characters who say exactly what they mean in the most embarrassing way possible. There are monologues in this show that should be studied in screenwriting programmes.
The musical work is also excellent. Hymns reworked as power ballads. Baby Billy's original country numbers, several of which Goggins sings himself. A score that takes the material seriously even when the material is a man in a private plane weeping about his Segway.
Critics were on board from the pilot. Season 1 landed with a TCA nomination and strong reviews. Season 2 expanded the world and sharpened the craft. Season 3 is, in my view, the peak. A near-perfect run of eight episodes that balances the farce and the feeling better than almost any comedy of the last decade. Season 4 closed the story in 2025, and the reception has been warm across the board. Four seasons is about right for a comedy of this intensity. It is going out on top.
Within the prestige-comedy world the show has quietly become a touchstone. It has the satirical bite of Succession, the tonal range of The White Lotus, and the shambolic-family DNA of Curb Your Enthusiasm, while being none of those things. McBride's fans already rank it alongside or above Eastbound & Down, which is not a casual claim.
Because it is funny. Genuinely, consistently, stupidly funny, in a way television comedy rarely is any more. And because underneath all the motorbikes and monster trucks and megachurch pageantry there is a family that loves each other badly. A patriarch trying to make peace with what he built. Three grown children who cannot stop needing their father's approval.
If you have never watched a Danny McBride show, this is the one to start with. If you have watched them all, you already know this is the best of them. Eight episodes a season. Four seasons. A proper ending. Go.
Woke Rating: {{show:the-righteous-gemstones:woke}}/5 · Ranked: {{show:the-righteous-gemstones:rank_full}}
Skyler Gisondo
Gideon Gemstone
Edi Patterson
Judy Gemstone
Tony Cavalero
Keefe Chambers
Bradley Cooper
Guest star
John Goodman
Eli Gemstone
Jason Schwartzman
Recurring guest