HBO’s Best Comedy Isn’t Succession
If you watch one Sunday night show about a patriarch pitting his kids against each other, make it The Righteous Gemstones.
Stop me if you've heard it before: An aging patriarch, the self-made and ruthlessly dictatorial founder of a lucrative media empire, is wrestling with his life's legacy. Their adult children—bundles of entitlement and unquenchable ambition, alternately greedy and greedy for their father's power—relentlessly fight over who will come to power when Daddy decides to step down, a retirement date that is always unspecified. . All the while, the children, along with their mixed spouses and partners, plan to undermine both their fathers and each other so that they can take over the reins of the dynasty as soon as possible. This is all despite their lack of any clear vision of what they will do once they have it. Sunday Night on HBO!
I'm obviously talking about the televangelism satire The Righteous Gemstones, which is back for its second season after a two-year COVID-induced hiatus with a two-part premiere this Sunday. But I can, of course, talk about succession, HBO's Emmy-magnet, which may just be the most talked-about and obsessed show on television—for those of us who write about television, at least. Succession is an amazing show, filled with great performances and whip-smart writing. It was the center of a little controversy recently about whether or not it was a (very dark) comedy spawned by the brilliant profile of Michael Schulman's star Jeremy Strong. Strong doesn't believe it is; co-star Kieran Culkin disagrees; At the time of this writing, the matter remains unresolved.
Righteous Gems is in no danger of such ambiguity: it's a comedy with every fiber of its existence, and currently one of the funniest. The series' long-awaited return feels like a New Year's gift for 2022: In a moment with overwhelming appreciation for TV comedy that doesn't bother more than actual comedy, The Gemstones offers a welcome reminder That being funny is an art in itself- a difficult one, thrilling and totally necessary.
The sophomore season of the Gemstones has almost all the major players from the show from Season One back. The cast is played by the Gemstone family, including John Goodman's father as Ellie Gemstone, Danny McBride as first-born son Jesse (McBride also produced the show), Eddie Patterson as the mercurial middle daughter Judy, and Adam Devine as Allie's youngest son. Fashion-forward, fitness-obsessed Calvin. We're also treated to the return of Jennifer Nettles in extensive flashback sequences as the beloved Amy-Leigh gem of the family's powerhouse matriarch, whose lingering absence was the driving engine behind the show's first season.
Season Two is more ambitious in its plotting than the first, with the storyline featuring the unexpected emergence of paranormal figures from Allie's past, a seat-of-the-pants at a Christian-themed coastal resort, a body in rebellion. There are plans to open a cult of hotness, and many other developments, I will avoid spoiling it here. Initially, this can make the episode feel a bit too full, when the viewer sometimes senses that a logjam of ideas has piled up over a period of time.
Fortunately, the Gemstones' extraordinary collection of comedic brilliance makes it a pleasure to watch, even if its narrative flow is at times short. As a venue for world-class character actors, Ratna continues to lay claim to an embarrassment of riches. Walton returns in an even sharper form as baby Billy Freeman, the self-compassionate, ne'er-do-well uncle of the Goggins clan; Tim Baltz gives an extraordinarily awkward and consistently hilarious performance as Judy's earnest and supernaturally awkward partner, BJ; And Tony Cavalero is back as Keefe, consensual in a state of psycho-sexual slavery for the sensitive and soft-spoken ex-Satanist Calvin. The new season adds Eric Roberts, who has had some of the funniest work of his career as a wonderfully scandalous pro wrestling promoter, Eric Andre as Texas-based megachurch pastor Lyle Lissons, and Jason Schwartzman as investigative journalist Thaniel Block. Is.
The Righteous Gemstones is the third HBO series from the creative brain-trust of McBride and longtime collaborators Jody Hill and David Gordon Green, who between them direct the lion's share of episodes in Season 2. Gemstone is still not level level. Exquisite Eastbound and Down, the first walk of the trio, one of the great comics of the 21st century. But the Gemstones are more widely accessible than Eastbound, to say nothing of that show's successor, the pitch-dark and sporadically brilliant Vice Principal, which never got much viewership.
What makes a show so irresistible as gems as profane and raunchy—the quality that has made it a cult hit, and deserves to be made a non-cult—is remarkable warmth at its core. It's a show that's free of cynicism, while never feeling flashy or treacherous. This is not a show meant to teach a lesson or impart wisdom, as it respects its audience as adults, people mature enough to know that the sitcom is not a finishing school, so a church. Leave it alone. The show has an unmistakable sense of joy in every aspect of its execution: It looks like everyone involved is having the time of their lives, and it's the quality that is most powerfully bestowed upon the audience.
Two performances in Season Two are conspicuous in taking the show to its most sublime heights. Eddie Patterson was the breakout star of the show's first season and just might be one of the top three funniest actors on planet Earth right now. Her performance as Judy is a marvel of twitchy physicality, profanity and touch and an otherworldly command of time. Of Allie's children, Judy is the most chronically marginalized, in part because of her gender and her marriage to BJ, a newcomer to Christianity. This season the character is coming into its own and sometimes slowly approaching something like actual adulthood, a development Patterson's performance tracks with an all-consuming and uproarious intensity.
The other is John Goodman as Ellie Gemstone. Goodman has long been one of our finest actors, an artist of extraordinary dimension and depth. This season adds new layers and completeness to his character, especially in terms of fleshing out his personal history. If season one largely portrayed Ellie as a man always surrounded by his children while navigating the loss of his beloved wife, season two would have turned him into a seasoned, complex human being. who is forced to navigate the wrong steps and regrets of his life. It is a subtle and subtle performance that serves as the spiritual anchor of the show in more ways than one.
One of the great achievements of The Righteous Gemstones is one of the easiest goals in modern American life—the gaudy, scandal-ridden world of big-money televangelism—while never in condescension or cruelty. The world depicted in the show isn't one we'd like to admire or even visit, but McBride and his colleagues have created a work of unexpected empathy that lasts after the laughter stops. also remains. For a show that is essentially agnostic in its religious commitments, its fundamental optimism and humanism are inseparable from one another. As Sunday rituals go on, we can all do worse.
