Apparently, the forth and last season of The Righteous Gemstones ended about a month ago just as I was newly arrived on the scene of HBO Max and since that time my homepage of that app had been blazing up with this show's advertisement trying to get me to watch it. I avoided it since there were so many other things I wanted to watch and I wasn't sure about delving into a comedy surrounding something to do with religion. That was the extent of my knowledge that I could gather from the ad. I normally don't think about religion let alone give a fuck about it.
But gladly I decided last night to give it another shot and fired it up. It's basically like Succession but instead of a big multi-billion dollar media corporation, it's a multi-billion dollar megachurch. It has Danny McBride written all over it with his 12-year-old sensibility of irreverent silly humor spoofing everything you could imagine about these Rich-as-Solomon fucks that run these enormous, scammy, fake-Christian operations.
Now the writing isn't perfect. I'm only at the end of season one where it all wraps up the season's arc featuring the eldest son of the patriarch's eldest son scheming with a slimeball to rip off his family for millions, first with a hidden cam blackmail scheme then with a Easter day heist of the church's vaults.
Needless to say, it all goes wrong because of second thoughts, misunderstandings, greedy hangers-on, hilariously unbelievable coincidences and just plain amateurish, no doubt weed-induced writer's room laziness.
But, the skill of these actors playing their silly roles actually make it work somehow. What's not to love about a full-of-themself idiot, entitled-as-fuck Danny McBride, Edie Patterson as the middle-girl-child who, even though now middle-aged, never quite grew out of her rambunctious, punky tomboy phase, Adam DeVine as the pretty-much-we-figured-out closeted gay youngest child still sporting that out-of-style faux hawk and getting diggy with his youth pastor group and, of course, Big Daddy, John Goodman as Eli Gemstone, founder and patriarch of the Gemstone family, who run a massive megachurch to bring Jesus to the masses, or at least bring the masses' money to their pockets.
Can't wait to see what the next three seasons bring. I kind of hope it's like the first season where an entire season is devoted to one storyline and so on and so forth. Very different from say Succession where all the seasons were basically all the same thing: who's going to be in charge of the company. That got old even before season two got very far, so this will be refreshing -- we'll see.
I guess I'll soon find out since it looks like we're having a long, hot summer here so I'm not going out there anytime soon, I'll sit here in my air-conditioned house paying my $160 a month electric bill and enjoying my $18 a month HBO Max. Praise The Lord, my God – Television!
Halle-binge-luhia!
I almost forgot one of the surprise "gems" of the show. This little ditty performed below, which, from what I could tell Googling it and all, seems to be an original song written for the show. I think it's awesome and it captures perfectly that Bible Belt country charm that these televangelists love to portray. Plus, for the show to add such rich backstory as this (it's a "flashback" scene -- for more about it, watch the freakin' show!) is just great writing and makes up for some of the stupid shit like the bungled heist.