The Righteous Gemstones: A Season 3 Post-Mortem And Season 4 Wish List

More Shea Whigham, you bastards! And why is Eli Gemstones such a kindly old grandpa?

This post will contain spoilers for the season finale of The Righteous Gemstones.

The Righteous Gemstones was renewed for a fourth season on HBO last week, even before this week’s finale, after reportedly averaging 5.1 million viewers per episode this season. It’s hard to know what viewership numbers mean these days (especially company-reported ones like these, as most are in the age of streaming) but at the least they make for an interesting point of comparison. Succession, for example, averaged 8.7 million viewers in its final, most-watched season, according to Forbes, peaking with the finale in May.

I’ve compared Succession to the Velvet Underground of TV shows — only two million people saw the finale, but all of them wrote a blog* — and considering Succession seemed to generate rougly 100 times as many dissections, profiles, and thinkpieces, it’s interesting that Succession’s and The Righteous Gemstones’ numbers are so comparable. I happen to think both shows are worth writing about, so consider this my minor attempt to close the Gemstones’ blah-blah gap. It’s a show I enjoy, but if it’s going to carry on for another season there are some directions it could and should go.

This season completed a satisfying arc (arguably much better than the previous one), and judged solely on total number of times I had to mute it because I was laughing too hard from a previous bit, it’s easily a top-five comedy on TV. Gemstones has false starts, storylines that get too zany, and others that never get off the ground, but I can always count on at least one home run joke or line read per episode, and that’s what keeps me watching. This has been true of most of Danny McBride’s shows and there’s probably a lesson in that: God grant us comedy writers dumb enough to entertain any premise but smart enough to deliver a great punchline.

That being said, this season seemed to have more missed opportunities than ever.

Case in point: Shea Whigham! Even if you don’t know this guy’s name, I can almost guarantee you know his face. He’s one of those veteran character actors who seem to elevate every show they’re in, the kind that Danny McBride in particular seems to excel at both casting and giving the room to shine.

Whigham played legendary NASCAR driver Dusty Daniels in this season of Gemstones, and his moment with Walton Goggins in the finale, a face-to-face orgasm scene set during a flashback to a Y2K cocaine bender, was one of those scenes that forced me to hit the pause button to collect myself.

HBO

After a season that teased Whigham’s character in the premiere, it felt like this episode was finally living up to that first one’s promise — to incorporate into it a classic “Shea Whigham Guy” (chain smoking, hungover, always looking like he’s battling a bad case of acid reflux but with hard-won wisdom about an indifferent universe). Shea Whigham going toe-to-toe with Walton Goggins? Count me in. Danny McBride deserves credit for almost single-handedly mainstreaming the idea of Walton Goggins as a comedic actor, and there was no reason to believe at this season’s outset that he couldn’t do the same for Whigham.

And yet ultimately he delivered… what, less than five minutes of total Shea Whigham time? This in a season that had begun by building up a battle over Dusty Daniels’ church membership, between the Gemstones and their rival preachers, the Simkins, led by Stephen Dorff. Instead, season three took a detour, into the sibling rivalry between Eli (John Goodman) and his sister, May-May (Kristen Johnson), her husband, Peter (Steve Zahn) and their kids. I’m all for a good misdirect, and a surprise Kristen Johnson arc is a nice way to soften the blow (I’m a staunch member of team 3rd Rock From the Sun Was Good, Actually), but there’s a fine line between a misdirect and a cock tease (in Gemstones parlance). Surely we could’ve used more than five minutes of Shea Whigham? (It did seem like the correct amount of screen time for Stephen Dorff).

Meanwhile, Uncle Baby Billy remained the show’s most reliable source of comedy (along with Edi Patterson’s line reads), and McBride and Co. were smart to close the season with a taste of “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers” — the show Uncle Billy been pitching to Jesse all season. Any taste we can get of Baby Billy’s subconscious invading reality is welcome, and for a few minutes it lived up to the hype, complete with breakdancers, a full studio band, and a hyper-tanned Goggins sweating like Billy Swaggert.

The show has clearly been using Baby Billy, an unreformed grifter who never bothered trying to make himself look legit, as the counterpoint to the more image-conscious Eli. But that simply brings into focus this season’s most obvious flaw: why is Eli Gemstone such a boy scout?

In a show that’s otherwise been notable for giving undersung character actors their due, Gemstones stands out as one of John Goodman’s least scene-stealing performances. And this from one of the greatest comedic character actors of all time (the fact that neither Big Lebowski nor Inside Llewyn Davis scored him an Oscar nomination is a crime). On paper, Goodman seems like a natural fit for the expanded McBride-iverse. He can chew scenery like rabid badger; so why does his performance as Eli feel like it has the volume turned way down?

The only answer I can come up with is that the Eli Gemstone character just isn’t giving him enough to do. Last season at least attempted to give Eli some depth — through flashbacks as a thumb-breaking pro wrestler who moonlighted as a debt collector. This season seemed to move on from all of that, and forced him even more into the role of kindly grandfather, bedeviled by his bumptuous brood of deranged failchildren. The spoiled children’s failings are obviously central to the show, but why go so soft on Eli? We don’t need to believe he’s nice in order commiserate with him about his kids being turds.

Gemstones doesn’t have to be Succession (and in a lot of ways benefits from being a less message-driven counterprogramming) but if the show is going to be about heirs jockeying for favor from a patriarch, the least they could do is make that patriarch interesting. Likewise, Gemstones doesn’t have to skewer the Falwells as much as Succession skewers the Murdochs, but it could easily make Eli a lot more of a son of a bitch without turning him into a perfect one-to-one stand-in for Jerry Falwell (who was undoubtedly a son of a bitch).

Eli’s children are all comical buffoons. Where are the seeds of this? They’re just “spoiled?” That’s it? The patriarch who helped build a Bible-based empire of charlatanism never mind-fucked his kids, not even a little bit?

It’s mostly a credit to The Righteous Gemstones that they don’t spend the entire show trying to remind you that the characters are bad people and hypocrites (which would be dull and obvious). Yet it’s always there in the background — why else end the season with a literal plague of locusts?

In the end, the Gemstones merely waited for the bugs to pass and carried on with their lives. At its best you could say that it’s a show about imperfect people clawing a few moments of brief satisfaction from a mostly-hostile universe. You can commiserate in that way, even with these assholes. Still, The Righteous Gemstones is not a show about good behavior, and this season’s final moments felt a little too much like a nice old man having a nice moment with his kids. Probably could’ve done with a little less hugging and learning, as the old Seinfeld mantra goes.

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*The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The Righteous Gemstones is not a show about the media, so of course media people wouldn’t follow it as closely. Gemstones also isn’t about hip coastal folks or the aspirationally rich like Succession. The Gemstones are rich, but tacky. The Roys of Succession are overtly assholes and buffoons, like the Gemstones (and even with the same sibling gender breakdown) but I’ve heard it pointed out (I think it might’ve been Felix Biederman) that the Roys all still sort of dress and live more the way we like to imagine the uber rich dress (suits and dresses and smart haircuts and designer shit). Rather than the way they actually do, which looks more like Billions (overpriced t-shirts, boring vests).