Someday, and hopefully soon, we will look back and fully appreciate the total treasure that has been The Righteous Gemstones. Since its premiere in 2019, Danny McBride’s brilliant, profane, bonkers, and ebulliently big-hearted satire of a scheming and squabbling family of televangelists has been the best comedy on television, one of those rare works that channels all the pathos and anxiety of its moment and turns them into something warm, hilarious, human, even redemptive. The show’s fourth and final season, which starts Sunday on HBO, finds McBride and his ridiculously talented band of collaborators going out on top, and at the top of their game. It’s only March, but if The Righteous Gemstones’ capstone season ends up being the best thing on TV in 2025, it will have been a good year for TV indeed.
Season 4 opens with a striking, stand-alone episode that I won’t spoil other than to say that it’s probably the most ambitious half-hour that the show has ever undertaken. From there the new season rejoins us with the three adult Gemstone children, Jesse (played by McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson), and Kelvin (Adam DeVine), who’ve effectively inherited the family megachurch and its associated holdings from their retired father, Eli (John Goodman), who has recently decamped to a life of mild decrepitude aboard a sailboat in Florida. Jesse is attempting to market private rent-a-chapels that he’s dubbed “Prayer Pods”; Judy is still pursuing her singing career while caring for her husband; the recently out-of-the-closet Kelvin is leading Prism, an alternative Christian worship community. Meanwhile Jesse’s oldest son, Gideon (Skyler Gisondo), is trying and failing to take up the mantle of preaching, while his middle son Pontius (Kelton DuMont) has been kicked out of military school. With Eli both figuratively and literally gone fishin’, both the Gemstone family and the Gemstone family business are increasingly rudderless.
The Righteous Gemstones has always been partly a show about grief, a comic portrait of a family struggling in the aftermath of an unimaginable loss, namely that of beloved wife and mother Aimee-Leigh Gemstone. (Aimee-Leigh frequently appears in flashback sequences throughout the show, wonderfully portrayed by real-life country singer Jennifer Nettles.) Aimee-Leigh’s death, which occurred shortly before the events of the show’s first season, and the hole that it has left in the family, is the driving engine behind most of the show’s narrative development. Season 4 finds widower Eli exploring dating again, which prompts predictably unhinged responses from his three children, who all but worship their late mother.
The Righteous Gemstones boasts so many fantastic and one-of-a-kind performances—just last year I extolled Edi Patterson’s otherworldly work as Judy, and Tim Baltz and Tony Cavalero’s supporting turns as Gemstone spouses are similarly worthy of hosannas. The final season provides a glorious showcase for another of the show’s greatest creations, namely Walton Goggins’ Baby Billy Freeman, or “Uncle Baby Billy” as he’s known to the Gemstone family. Between his indelible roles in dramas like The Shield and Justified and his virtuosic work in comedies like Vice Principals and this one, Goggins has a strong case as one of the best television actors of the 21st century, and Baby Billy is a career highlight. The role is a masterpiece of physical comedy and inimitable line delivery, right down to the frequent punctuation of sentences with “here” and “now” (pronounced “hyuh and “nuh”), or sometimes combined into the declarative “look hyuh nuh.”
This season feels like the show’s writers and directors have fully taken the reins off both Goggins and Baby Billy, and the result is incredible to behold. A hilarious subplot involves Baby Billy’s increasingly frantic attempts to bring to fruition his latest passion project, “Teenjus,” a young-adult television drama about Jesus as a brooding teen. It’s a storyline that goes in ever-more-insane directions that only work because of how totally committed Goggins is to the performance. His deranged transformation rivals Steve Little’s performance as Stevie Janowski in McBride’s first HBO series, Eastbound & Down, which might be the highest compliment I can imagine bestowing on a comedic actor.
For a show that never sugarcoats its core subject matter—namely the exploitative intertwinement of faith, capitalism, and media in contemporary America, the pernicious effects of which over the past half-century are difficult to overstate—one of the true miracles of The Righteous Gemstones is the show’s complete refusal of cynicism. So much of the buzziest television of the so-called Trump Era has tended to wallow in people’s awfulness, from dystopian dramas like The Handmaid’s Tale and Watchmen to scabrous satires like Succession and The White Lotus. I have enjoyed many of these shows, but it’s hard not to feel like they just make us all feel worse about each other, indulging our desires to learn that the kinds of people we’ve always thought were terrible are in fact even worse than we imagine.
The brilliance of The Righteous Gemstones, and the source of its comedy, is that it’s a show about basically decent people who are trying their hardest to be terrible and failing at it. Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin all aspire to live the lives of consequence-free sociopaths, but they don’t ultimately have the stomach or the absence of conscience for it. They are fuckups through and through who love each other and can’t help stumbling their way into accidental empathy, time and time again. All the while, the show implicitly affirms that most people, even those affiliated with an industry that many believe to be rotten, are in fact better than our worst expectations of them. It’s fundamentally optimistic without ever feeling sanctimonious or sentimental, and its humor is weird and crass and wildly inventive while never being cruel.
Any eulogy for The Righteous Gemstones must come back to this most important point: It was unfailingly, riotously, unbelievably funny. There are many great things that art can do, many wonderful and complicated emotions that it can provoke, but making people laugh is a crucial and underrated one. Making people laugh, particularly to the degree that The Righteous Gemstones has, is an unmitigated good, a shared and deeply pleasurable celebration of human imperfection. In the “prestige TV” era there’s been a tendency for critics and awards bodies to shower praise on nominal “comedies” whose unfunniness often gets mistaken for sophistication or moral rectitude. But making people laugh is a lot harder than not making them laugh, and a lot more important. The Righteous Gemstones made those of us who loved it laugh harder and more satisfyingly than anything else on television, during a time when we needed it. It’s a great achievement, and a great work of art.
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