Holy Shit Is the Second Season of The Righteous Gemstones Amazing!
it was kind of like this
When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, I was a huge fan of the actor Michael Jordan, who had a lucrative sideline as the greatest basketball player of all time.
This may be hard to believe, but Jordan was even better at playing basketball than he was at doing comedy! Like everyone, Jordan had his off days and bad games but being the GOAT, he had fewer off days and bad games than just about anyone else.
Jordan was almost always good but there were times when he seemed to have a magical spiritual connection with the basket and was incapable of missing a shot, blowing a rebound or screwing up an assist.
When Jordan was in this heightened state people said that he was “in the zone.”
No basketball player in history was better than Jordan when he was in the zone.
When something or someone is in a place where they can seemingly do no wrong I subsequently think of it as being “in the zone.”
For example there was a time when The Colbert Report was the funniest, most relevant and important satire around, when every episode was appointment television.
That’s how I feel about the second season of The Righteous Gemstones, which ended on February 27th of this year.
Danny McBride is one of the preeminent auteurs in television history. He’s still only forty-five years old, which I think we can all agree is VERY young (full disclosure: I’m forty-five) yet he has created, in Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals and now The Righteous Gemstones an incredible legacy and changed television forever.
“Cinematic” does not begin to do justice to the fever-dream intensity and Lynchian weirdness of The Righteous Gemstones in its second season. If there was any justice in the world, the nominees for the Best Direction Emmy should be five episodes of The Righteous Gemstones.
Every episode is like a mini-movie that works spectacularly as a stand-alone piece of entertainment but gains an additional power from its relationship with the rest of the show.
At the end of pretty much every episode this season I turned to my wife and said “Holy shit. How are they going to top that?”
Whenever it seems like the show cannot get more ambitious, audacious or accomplished it outdoes itself.
A quintessentially McBride exploration of strangely likable monsters, The Righteous Gemstones centers on a superstar family of evangelical televangelists led by Dr. Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), a former wrestler and thug who switched up hustles and got rich, famous and enormously powerful through the God racket.
Going into The Righteous Gemstones, I did not think it was possible for me to have more respect for Goodman or love him more. I was wrong! In a cast lousy with ringers and singular, spectacular talents, Goodman nevertheless dominates.
He’s one of those titanic figures, like Sterling Hayden and John Huston, who grow more commanding and authoritative with time rather than less so. He is a bear of a man who is terrifying in his ferocity and poignant in his palpable pain over the death of his beloved wife Aimee-Leigh.
McBride plays his eldest son and seeming heir Jesse, a debauched hedonist with Kenny Powers-like appetites and predilections who keeps his rapacious appetite for sin separate from his public life as a professional man of God.
The fearless and hilarious Edi Patterson, a standout on Vice Principals, is savage as Eli’s daughter Judy, who somehow manages to hold it together for the cameras but is borderline feral in her private life.
Adam DeVine rounds out the family Kelvin, an effete youth preacher who presides over a cult of bible-thumping, physical perfection-worshipping musclemen who turn on Kelvin due to his physical and emotional weakness.
In the second season of The Righteous Gemstones guest stars named Eric in very different places in their lives and careers deliver Emmy-worthy turns. Eric Andre is perfectly cast as a rival evangelist looking to form a pragmatic partnership with the Gemstones in a way that will do wonders for his bottom line and his national profile while Eric Roberts, yes, Eric Roberts, the Talking Cat!?! himself, is absolutely riveting in the scene-stealing role of a long-ago frenemy of Eli’s who reappears in the wealthy man’s life with ominous intentions.
Roberts’ comeback turn here serves as a potent reminder that in the right role the insanely prolific Star 80 star can be legitimately great and Roberts’ role in The Righteous Gemstones is his best in decades.
But that’s not all! Season 2 also features M. Emmet Walsh, John Amos, Jason Schwartzman, Macauley Culkin and Joe Jonas in a hilarious, self-deprecating turn as himself.
And I haven’t even mentioned Walton Goggins, whose performance as Baby Billy is literally one of the best things ever. It’s fucking iconic.
I’m very happy and relieved that The Righteous Gemstones was picked up for a third season though part of me worries that there’s nowhere to go for the show from this point but down.
Then again, McBride and the gang have blown me away before, repeatedly, so I have sky-high hopes for what should be another all-time great season of transcendent television more cinematic than 99 percent of the movies in theaters.
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