Why Isn't Everyone Talking About The Righteous Gemstones? It's Great!
I don’t quite remember what I thought of Foot Fist Way. I vaguely recall finding it intriguingly flawed and its star/co-writer Danny McBride a new and exciting comic talent.
It did not take me long to become a Danny McBride super-fan. I adored his career-making turn as Kenny Powers, a preeminent icon of unashamed working class Southern masculinity.
I also loved McBride’s less successful, less well known follow-up series Vice Principals. It was a characteristically audacious and accomplished exploration of ambition, competition and the knotty intersection of gender and race that paired McBride with the brilliant Walton Goggins as an arch-rival who would do anything to realize his own dreams and professional aspirations and destroy those of his competitors.
Vice Principals only lasted two seasons. It went out on top and was followed, miraculously, by The Righteous Gemstones.
When I first discovered The Righteous Gemstones just about everything about it excited me, beginning with the fact that it was created by, and stars, Danny McBride, one of television’s true auteurs.
I got even more psyched when I learned that the patriarch of a colorful clan of Southern televangelists would be played by John Goodman. It does not get any better than that and the fact that Goodman has been starring in a whole different television series (The Conners) the entire time he’s been on The Righteous Gemstones is very impressive, as he is not a young man.
My anticipation increased when I saw that in addition to McBride, Goodman’s children would be played by Adam Devine of Workaholics and Edi Patterson from Vice Principals (where she stole the show in a supporting role) and Comedy Bang Bang.
Danny McBride is ideally cast in the Danny McBride role of a vulgar, arrogant Southern jackass with a wildly exaggerated sense of his own abilities and importance. Patterson is fearless and feral as a uniquely disgusting human being who nevertheless is at the epicenter of a Godly empire due to a trick of heredity. Devine rounds out the main cast as a pornography-battling Youth Group leader who is flamboyant and effeminate but also deep in the closet.
Audiences are wise to be wary of comedies that take aim at evangelists or televangelists because they make for easy and lazy satirical targets. What could be a bigger, more egregious illustration of the intertwined hypocrisy and greed of capitalism and Christianity than slicksters with big hair and flashy clothes promising rubes that God will reward them in this world and the next for giving them money to maintain their extravagant lifestyles?
To its credit The Righteous Gemstones begins with the understanding that televangelists are, by trade, liars and hypocrites and opportunists fleecing the faithful. With that out of the way it can tell a sprawling story at once achingly human and larger than life.
McBride keeps topping himself television-wise although I hear that is not necessarily true of his screenplays for the Halloween movies he makes with The Righteous Gemstones director and Executive Producer David Gordon Green. Incidentally, if anyone wants to choose the final Halloween movie for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I would love an opportunity to write about it.
Every time it seems like the show can’t get any bigger, or wilder, or more deliciously excessive it soars over what it’s done before with the delirious abandon of McBride’s eldest son of the show, a slight, polite slip of a man who is an amazing badass and world-class stuntman without otherwise seeming extraordinary in any way.
The entire cast is fantastic, with Tim Baltz being a standout as the long-suffering husband of Patterson’s character but the heart and soul of the show is Goodman. In a wild rumpus of a show overflowing with wackiness and transgression Goodman is the cool, calm core of everything.
This past season he retired and left the business to his squabbling progeny. It’s been Goodman’s King Lear year as a lion of a man looks back at his complicated legacy with an appropriately complex set of emotions.
And I haven’t even gotten to Walton Goggins’ white-haired, silver-tongued uber creep Baby Billy yet. He is legitimately one of the greatest characters in television history. His performance of “Misbehaving” should have won the show the Nobel Prize.
I have no idea why The Righteous Gemstones is not a pop culture phenomena. I have no idea why it’s not the subject of water cooler conversation every Monday. I have no idea why it’s seemingly not winning any awards when it deserves pretty much every award.
I don’t care about awards, or at least I pretend not to care about awards in order to seem cool but when the Emmys are announced I excitedly go through them to see if The Righteous Gemstones is up for anything and am perplexed, confused and disappointed when it’s not nominated for anything.
What are Emmy voters smoking? Is it that weed that’s legal in California? Or some primo Delta 9? Whatever it is, it’s inexplicably causing them to ignore and dishonor one of the best and biggest television shows of all time.
I hope that this proves to be a Schitt’s Creek situation, where a beloved show is cherished by a small but devoted cult for its first few years before exploding in popularity and winning all of the awards, attention and validation it deserves in the home stretch.
In conclusion, watch The Righteous Gemstones. It’s fucking great and you’re going to love it.
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