I can play “This Little Light of Mine” and “Toxic”.
Both great, pick one.
I have spent the past few months slowly working through all of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones and finally finished it this week. It is, of course, great, a comedic masterpiece by a guy who has at least four comedic masterpieces under his belt, Danny McBride. One of my favorite comedy films of all time is 2006’s The Foot Fist Way, in which McBride plays a strip mall Tae Kwon Do instructor, and it’s the first showcase for McBride’s incredible ability to deliver incredible dialogue (“Tae Kwon Do is terrific for keeping in shape, but it's also a deadly serious killing system”). He co-wrote the film with Ben Best and Jody Hill, the latter of whom also directed and has collaborated with McBride across multiple comedy projects. The Foot Fist Way could have just been dumbass one-liner after dumbass one-liner, punctuated with the occasional gag of McBride punching a child in the face, and that would have been really fun by itself, but the pity that the film feels for a man who has let the tiniest amount of power go to his head, and who ends up finding a way to make peace with himself and help out his students, gives the film a character arc and emotional payoff that puts it head and shoulders above other comedies from the early-to-mid 2000s. It’s also clearly a labor of love: I took Tae Kwon Do through my local park district for years, and I can assure you that every single Tae Kwon Do reference in that film is 100% real, and drawn from Jody Hill’s experience as a former strip mall Tae Kwon Do instructor. I said the same student oath that the students say in the film. The five “chapters” of the film are named after the five tenets of Tae Kwon Do: Courtesy, Integrity, Perseverance, Self-Control, and Indomitable Spirit (the chapter titles are, perhaps, used ironically). It is a comedy made by people who care deeply about what they do.
Similarly, Eastbound & Down, McBride’s first HBO series that ran from 2009-2013, could have just been a similar character spouting off similar idiocy, but, again, McBride/Best/Hill cared deeply about what they did, and kept poking at the shame and humiliation under Kenny Powers’ bluster to build him into a real character with a real arc. They were also confident enough to basically blow up and reset the series’ structure and cast each season, with the exception of Stevie, because they were smart enough to know that when you write a character like Stevie, you have to give him as much time on screen as possible. The story on Vice Principals (2016-2017) was a little thinner, and the series only ran for two seasons, but it was still fun and I think it was the first time Walton Goggins did comedy, so obviously I was excited to see the guy who played Boyd Crowder team up with the guy who played Kenny Powers so they could do jokes together (the acid trip during the football game is an especially memorable sequence for me).
The Righteous Gemstones (2019-2025), though, comes after McBride had enough successes that HBO was willing to let him do anything he wanted, and as a result it is the full package, his best and most complete work, both the funniest and most profound thing he’s ever made. McBride’s own character is definitely of a piece with the other blustering idiots he’s played, but he’s less central to the story in this series because he’s surrounded by such an incredible ensemble; I did not truly know what reviewers meant when they called an actress a “revelation” until I saw Edi Patterson play Judy Gemstone (who was praised in reviews for being, as it turns out, a revelation)1. The Gemstone family at the center of the series runs a televangelism and megachurch empire in South Carolina; John Goodman (John Goodman!) is the patriarch of the family, still grieving the loss of his wife, and his three idiot children are all squabbling over perceived slights and the future of the multi-million-dollar church.
But, as with all of McBride’s work, this isn’t just a story about stupid people doing stupid things. This is a labor of love. This is the world McBride grew up in (his mother, like the deceased Gemstone matriarch, was active in Christian puppet and music ministry). Jason Kirk has assured me that the megachurch world depicted in the show is absolutely true to life. And, most importantly, the Gemstones are not grifters. These are not people just spewing bullshit about the prosperity gospel to get rubes to fork over their money. The Gemstones believe in what they say and do, they’re just not very bright, but they are, occasionally, trying to do right by the people they love. These are characters with which I could not spend five minutes in a room in real life, and McBride - this is the only one of his series that he has a solo creator credit on - made me care about them and their happiness deeply. Gemstones is also the most heavily plotted of McBride’s series, with villains and blackmail and car chases alongside the usual comedy that makes the whole thing feel like a Coen brothers movie set against a megachurch backdrop. Although it’s possible that I’m just saying that because John Goodman is in this.
My favorite line in the whole series comes very early in the first season. Two of the antagonists are trying to lay out a blackmail plot, and they’re not especially good at planning it, and at one point one of them asks the other “are you sure about this? Because it feels like you’re trying to be a movie.” “You’re trying to be a movie” is such a solid summary of most of the inter- and intra-personal conflicts in Gemstones, but also a problem that I find over and over in the people I make fun of on my stupid blog. They’re trying to do a movie. Word on Fire wrote that piece about how more young men should watch Gladiator and Lord of the Rings and, uh, Braveheart, so they can learn to be heroes themselves like they ones they see in those movies. JD Vance also thinks he’s in Lord of the Rings. Taylor Marshall also thinks he’s in Lord of the Rings (nobody in this movement can read, like, a Larry McMurtry novel or something). Rick Heilman thought he was in, depending on the period in his career, an Arthurian legend or the Mark Wahlberg movie where an amateur walks onto the Philadelphia Eagles. But the books I read were Pensees and Speedboat and Dilexit Nos and Easy Essays and Book of the New Sun, and where I got was: I’m not a hero on a quest in a famous legend. I’m not doing a movie at all. I know I keep hitting on that theme over and over, but it’s important. You're not in a movie, there's just you, and there's just all the people around you who are just as real as you are, and how you treat them matters. And for a guy like Danny McBride to be able to explore that theme so well over a twenty-year career, but also deliver lines like “Dentistry? I can't even believe that's something that's real” is a singular achievement.
YouTube will not let me embed Judy’s Outback Steakhouse monologue so you can just click this link.
Also, whoever was in charge of costuming Judy and BJ deserves an Emmy.