Massive spoilers for all of The Righteous Gemstones Season One follow.
Getting into The Righteous Gemstones, you think you know what you're setting yourself up for. It's a satirical take of mega-evangelists from Danny McBride, Jody Hill and David Gordon Green, the trio behind prior McBride comedies on HBO, Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals. As the show begins its first episode, the titular family of preachers live the kind of lavish lifestyle you'd expect, Jesse Gemstone (Danny McBride), Kelvin Gemstone (Adam DeVine) and Judy Gemstone (Edi Patterson) live on an expansive compound with their father Eli Gemstone (John Goodman). Eli's the face of their mega-church that's now expanding into smaller towns and each of the Gemstone kids have their own reasons for wanting to get a higher-profile in the church.
Conflict emerges in the lives of the Gemstones once Jesse gets word that a man in a devil mask is blackmailing him by way of an incriminating video showing Jesse and his middle-aged male Church pals engaging in cocaine, sex workers and crack while at a Church retreat. Jesse, with Kevlin and Judy in tow, agrees to show up to a strip mall to hand off money to the blackmailers...and this is where the show goes in a bleak direction I certainly didn't see coming. The first episode of The Righteous Gemstones ends with Jesse deliberately running over the two people in charge of the blackmail escapade. This is no accident, he makes a point to crush one of the two individuals trying to flee the scene.
Jesse Gemstone is a murderer (or at least he thinks he does, the two people end up surviving), a brutal way to cap off what seemed like a lark poking fun at wealthy evangelists. It was the complete opposite of what I expected and I loved it, The Righteous Gemstones was reaching for something much darker than typical Danny McBride productions, this ending signaled a program that was more Breaking Bad than The Foot Fist Way. It's an ending that cements the darkness lying underneath a seemingly squeaky-clean clan of people preaching morality and suggests inevitable despair for the members of said clan. If they're willing to murder in the first episode of their own show, what else are these Gemstones capable of and how will it inevitably lead to their already imperiled world crumbling?
Such an audacious way to kick off the season left me itching to see where it would go next and subsequent episodes of The Righteous Gemstones tended to be at their best when engaging with either darker subject matter or morally ambiguous characters. This was most notably seen in the shows best episode, the appropriately titled Interlude that flashed back to the past to follow now-deceased Gemstone matriarch Aimee-Leigh Gemstone (Jennifer Nettles) grappling between her own personal desires to pause her showbiz career due to her pregnancy and the ambitious tour plans of her brother Baby Billy (Walton Goggins). You'd be forgiven for forgetting you're watching an ostensible comedy while watching Interlude, much of the episode is dedicated to drama between Aimee-Leigh and her brother that's impressively written, their scenes together crackle with an authentic sibling rapport.
However, as the show went on, some worrying signs begin to creep in, chiefly the dynamic between Gideon Gemstone (Skyler Gisondo) and the rest of the Gemstone family. Gideon's the eldest son of Jesse who went off to Los Angeles to pursue a stuntman career and has now returned seemingly to patch things up but really is around as the mastermind behind the blackmail scheme to get payback at his father. However, Gideon begins to get closer to the Gemstone family and eventually turns on his scummy partner, Scotty (Scott MacArthur). Good on abandoning Scotty, that guy was trash, but Gideon's declaration that the Gemstones "...aren't perfect, but they're good people" just rings hollow. The Righteous Gemstones has worked best when dealing with moral complexity, Gideon's one-note embrace of his family just feels so trite by comparison.
The rest of the season eventually goes down a redemptive arc for the Gemstone family that culminates in a season finale, Better is the End of a Thing than its Beginning, that's shockingly predictable for a show that kicked off with such an unpredictable ending. The three Gemstone siblings and Eli unite and put away the personal problems that had led Eli to abandon his kids just a few minutes ago to get back money Baby Billy stole from the church. It's an episode full of supposedly big dramatic moments that even I could see coming (namely Baby Billy getting hit by lightning and the return of an abruptly introduced visual manifestation of Aimee-Leigh as a bumblebee) that closes out with a schmaltzy sermon given by Eli set to footage of the majority of the shows status quo being restored.
That's what really frustrating about The Righteous Gemstones, the way its final episode cops out on having any significant changes happen to the characters. Judy and her boyfriend B.J. get back together, Kelvin gets his roommate Keefe back with no trouble, the church gets to keep running as it did beforehand. The only one whose life gets turned upside down is Jesse (his wife's divorced him after he comes clean about his bad behavior) and even he gets to go to Haiti to do missionary work with Gideon. Even Eli finds redemption for running out smaller church leaders, a particularly aggravating plot turn. Why did even that plot thread have to get a tidy resolution? Wouldn't it have been more realistic for the Gemstones to face the truth of how, sometimes, there isn't easy conflict resolution to be found even once you start improving your own behavior?
Shows like BoJack Horseman get great drama out of the long-term ripple effects out of a persons actions that find way more interesting ways of resolving plot threads than just tidy conclusions. Those kind of programs ensure that their own unique status quo is around primarily to be altered. The Righteous Gemstones, on the other hand, opts for tidy schmaltz over introspective character work in its final episodes and that just feels like such a waste. The eventual redemptive storyline they choose to go down just doesn't work simply because the Gemstone characters haven't been written in a fashion that allows me to buy or root for their redemption. Their characters better suited for a story like the one in Casino about inevitable ruin, not gradual change for the better.
When you start off your show with the lead character murdering two people, that sets you up for a lot of things, but a super-traditional redemption storyline isn't one of them. This is a program that works best when it actually digs into darker story material, so why did the seasons overarching storyline end up dovetailing into such a predictable outcome that didn't fit either the characters or the best attributes of The Righteous Gemstones? Heck, I at first thought Eli's sermon was gonna be revealed to be a dream, it felt so out-of-place in this show. Maybe it would have been better if it had been. The Righteous Gemstones started out with plenty of bold promise, but it eventually decided to just preach to a more conventional storytelling choir rather than following a nobler ambitious storytelling path. Oh well, even if the show ended up being underwhelming, at least it delivered unto the world the absolute banger of a tune Misbehavin'.
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