The Surprising Profundity of The Righteous Gemstones
This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The Righteous Gemstones.
Though it uses the register of low comedy rather than moody character study or tragicomic caper, HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, which follows a family of materialistic and vaguely corrupt religious showpeople, is prestige TV in the classic mold. Like Succession or Better Call Saul, it centers on a richly flawed antihero as he builds his empire, and, in the process, studies the workings of American power and money. The popularity of these shows has led some critics to suspect that closely attending to such protagonists—especially when they are lent the glamour of handsome, high-budget production values—doubles as a form of subtle approval. In applying this storytelling model to a specifically Christian milieu, though, Gemstones upends it. Its characters are also flawed, and also vividly rendered. But for their bad behavior, they expect—and are granted—absolution, a worldview that foregrounds how strange and arbitrary the act of forgiveness is in the first place.
The show follows Jesse Gemstone, played by its showrunner, Danny McBride, with his trademark defensive combustibility, as he prepares to inherit a religious-entertainment empire from his father, Eli (John Goodman). Through flashbacks, the series shows us the rise of the Gemstones from hardscrabble small-time religious revivalists to Reagan-era TV stars to scandal-plagued Christian-theme-park operators. In depicting this ascent, the show also allows us to see that this family—Jesse; his youth-pastor brother, Kelvin (Adam Devine); his horny, aggressive sister, Judy (a particularly brilliant Edi Patterson); Eli, the stern patriarch; and his late wife, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), the closest thing the family had to a conscience—is knee-deep in much that is toxic about American culture. Whether it’s celebrity worship, consumerist waste, or phony relationship advice, the Gemstones have a hand in it. But the show never really allows the viewer to hate them. They are too funny, too desperate, too pathetic, too humanly appetitive to lose the audience’s grudging affection.
Part of the reason that this type of prestige show works is the creators’ genuine fascination with the environment their characters live in. McBride is the only storyteller I can think of who understands the particular world of religious showpeople well enough to fully exploit its dramatic potential—which is, like Jerry Falwell, way too rich. Because of the cultural and financial power held by televangelists, there’s immense artistic possibility to be found in digging into any discrepancies between their behavior and their beliefs, and the details of the ways they work—the grist of many great TV shows.
When televangelists succeed, they can find themselves on top of their world, just like Tony Soprano or Don Draper. But when they fail, as the Gemstones often do, they are both funnier and sadder than Saul Goodman: Nothing is more incongruous than a person performing the role of a wealthy and powerful person to their own disinterested family. Just as a person needn’t like organized crime in order to enjoy David Chase’s dissection of the mobster’s psychology, a secular viewer can observe the Gemstones’ worldly machinations with fascination (as does the investigative reporter Thaniel Block, played by Jason Schwartzman in the show’s second season). We’ve had a few classic novels (Elmer Gantry, Wise Blood) and movies (The Apostle, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) about the world of revivalist, Pentecostal Christianity, but Gemstones is the first show to fully dive in. The details of the first-season plot were so perfectly observed that the series seemed prophetic: Around the time its pilot aired, depicting Jesse being blackmailed with a video of himself and his church buddies snorting cocaine alongside sex workers, the second-generation evangelical figure Jerry Falwell Jr. found himself embroiled in a sex scandal. A more recent Southern Baptist controversy over the roles of women echoes the struggles of Judy to find her place in a patriarchal order.
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In the most recent season, Eli and his family are pitted against a set of relatives who have attempted to keep their Christianity weird and countercultural, in pointed contrast to the materialistic Gemstones. Unfortunately, in their case this means being violent right-wing survivalists. If the Gemstones practice a syncretism of Christ and money, their relatives are outright worshiping war and confusing it for worship of Christ. Their presence as a foil doesn’t exactly absolve the Gemstones; as we learn in a flashback episode, the relatives were put on this path because they lost all their money investing in Gemstone-branded Y2K-survival kits. Fittingly, the season’s climax involves a plague of locusts descending on everyone, and a big explosion—fire and judgment. And yet it ends, as both the previous seasons have ended, on a bizarrely moving and warm family reunion, one that—judging from the presence of Peter Montgomery (Steve Zahn), a character we have just seen blown up in a truck—may be taking place in some kind of afterlife. The show chastens the characters rather than destroying them.
In part due to these callbacks and returns, which make each season follow the same reassuringly predictable rhythms as a church service, the show has at times felt repetitive over its three-season run (with a fourth on the horizon): further scandals, yet more troublemaking extended family, yet another conciliatory whole-cast finale. The characters, too, develop only in inches: McBride needs them venal and voracious enough to remain funny, but if they learn nothing at all from their often egregious behavior, the show becomes impossible to enjoy. The characters grow exactly as much as people tend to when they know they will have another chance. The show treats these apparent weaknesses by turns mockingly and sentimentally; the odd interplay prompts the viewer to think again about what forgiveness is, and what it’s for.
Forgiveness is a fundamental part of any durable human social relations; sooner or later, even the best intentioned human beings hurt one another, and people need ways of recognizing and moving on from that hurt. Christianity takes this practice an extra step: Christ enjoins his followers to pray for their enemies, and to do good to those who hurt them, even when those enemies are still in the process of inflicting those wounds. But the tent-style revivalism practiced by Eli and Aimee-Leigh, built on intense appeals to sudden conversion, severs Christian practices of confession and forgiveness from churches and their representatives. If you are moved to repent in your heart, it says, you need not talk to a priest about it or make recognizable amends.
Revivalist faith is easy to mock—its rhetorical power can be hard to separate from performative salesmanship. But even an unbeliever might see the appeal of a religion that promises instant transformation. For the younger Gemstones, this promise initially comes not from a deep emotional experience but complacently, from their parents. Faith, to them, feels theoretical, an idea that forms the cornerstone of their lives but that’s also untested. They seem tempted to push the boundaries of sinful behavior—Jesse’s adultery, Judy’s meanness, the entire family’s materialism—to see if they will still be forgiven. They develop a conveniently weak sense of self: “And thank you, Lord, for forgiving me of my wrongdoings, which you know are not who I am,” prays Jesse in a first-season episode.
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TV critics in recent years have objected that the prestige-TV antihero, too, enjoys the forgiveness of viewers a little too easily. The idea is that we slip from finding a character like Logan Roy or Walter White interesting to tolerating or even admiring them—and then, perhaps, their real-life analogues. For some viewers, this is probably true; think of the many Breaking Bad fans who seem to have walked away from the show hating Walter’s mildly judgmental wife, Skyler, rather than the meth kingpin himself. To the extent that such series do work that way, it is the characters’ charisma that motivates our forgiveness. For the characters of Gemstones, a background truth of their worldview is that God has already forgiven them before the shouting even starts. That existential cushion, paradoxically, seems to allow these defensive, vain, frail characters enough room to start to change their behavior, as in the unexpectedly moving second-season sequence where Uncle Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) meets the adult child he once abandoned and immediately returns to the wife and baby he is in the process of leaving.
Impious as the show is, the way it scrambles cause and effect aptly captures the weird, anti-dramatic quality of forgiveness. On Gemstones, someone has to tell you you’re forgiven before you can start to make the sorts of choices that might render you forgivable. Part of the power of a good TV show is that it reminds us that rooting for characters and approving of them are not the same thing. Perhaps the same might be true of how we relate to the flawed, grasping people in our own lives. Or even to our flawed, grasping selves.