Eli Gemstone (John Goodman, a new and major addition to the ever-expanding McBride repertory) rose to fame decades ago alongside his wife Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), a big-haired, pastel-clad power couple in the vein of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Every member of the Gemstone family lives on a shared compound in their own personal McMansion Hell, with the oversized foyers to match.īut, at its core, The Righteous Gemstones aims to be a family show. But you’d never know that from looking at Gemstones, which opens with a mass baptism in an accidentally activated wave pool and whose characters ride in private jets dubbed The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. McBride, Hill, and Gordon Green frequently discuss how shooting in and around their adopted hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, offers them a reduced budget and the creative freedom that comes with it. With such an opulent setting, Gemstones gives the trio their widest staging ground yet. And what Simon is to the inner workings of the American city, McBride and his colleagues are to the inner workings of the American asshole.įrom the bootstrapped indie success of The Foot Fist Way through the extended character studies of Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, McBride-along with Jody Hill and David Gordon Green, together forming an amorphous brain trust of comedy that skewers masculinity from inside the house-has kept a set of themes while scaling up in ambition. Neither’s current project tends to be the flashiest entry in the network slate, but that modesty both belies and enables a dependable, well-crafted artistic signature. McBride’s place in the network’s constellation most closely resembles that of David Simon, even if the two have very different sensibilities. Premiering this Sunday, The Righteous Gemstones is the latest volume in McBride’s now-decadelong collaboration with a consistent creative patron in HBO. (Or maybe storytelling in general does where there’s a fading power broker choosing between unworthy successors, a King Lear comparison isn’t far behind.) But HBO’s latest internecine squabble is set in unfamiliar territory for the average prestige TV viewer, if not cocreator, star, and Southern scion Danny McBride: the opulent, insular world of an Evangelical megachurch. Unhappy families may each be unhappy in their own particular ways, but there’s no doubting America’s most prestigious cable network has a yen for a certain kind of dissatisfaction. Have you heard the good news about the HBO show? The one with a decaying family dynasty and a withholding patriarch-plus an entitled heir apparent, a puerile younger son, and a resentful, overlooked daughter? No, not that one.
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