In a glorious “Amen” to its four-season run, The Righteous Gemstones received a blessed bounty of Emmy nominations.
The categories in which it garnered nods speak to the show’s production values, including cinematography, music supervision, stunt coordination, costumes and sound editing.
There is method to creator Danny McBride’s mayhem.
For South Carolinians, the show is far more than the sum of its lauded cogs. Pry loose the oafish onslaught of the sophomoric, warring Gemstone siblings and you might detect this country’s faintly beating, if woefully misguided, heart. Based and baked in the South, its deceptively broad lens also sheds cinematic light on the head-scratching stuff of today’s American way.
My firsthand, if fleeting, experience with the show revealed that when you lift the hood of this jokey Southern-fried jalopy, there is an enterprise as refined as its characters are rough. On-screen and off, McBride calibrates a transfixing tension between the sacred and the profane, the misbegotten and the ill-informed.
In June 2024, I answered a children’s casting call on behalf of my then 11-year-old daughter Beatrice. When she was selected, they offered to place me, too.
The proof is a few skinny seconds of Season 4, Episode 3. A blurry pan catches me summoning my inner church lady and nodding self-righteously aside a befuddled tween in Sunday’s finest plaid. The scene was a worship service set in a Goose Creek strip mall church sufficiently dispiriting for me to envision the production design team gleefully reporting how sublimely it sapped the soul.
That morning, a friendly, focused crew herded dozens of us from parking lot to wardrobe to a holding room, a fluorescent-lit cattle call with hours-long spells spent praying our phones didn’t run out of lifewhile ingesting endless reserves of vending-machine snacks.
Filing into a no-frills sanctuary, we gathered as the congregation for the three Gemstones at the altar. The elder son Jesse, the unsubtle egoist, is portrayed with good-ole boy bluster by McBride. Judy, his trash-talking train wreck of an alpha sister, had actor Edi Patterson dancing spasmodically in a pitch-perfect, pastel sequin getup. Adam DeVine realized, Kelvin, the mini-muscle-man baby brother,with equal parts twinkle and twang.
At the runthrough, the actors paced through blocking and lines at an amiable half-measure, seemingly reserving energy for cameras to come. Crew members trained their gazes on the pews, remixing and matching us for reasons not disclosed.
Then, after once again cooling our heels in the holding room, we returned to the sanctuary. An action-ready director David Gordon Green commanded the movements of a massive, dollied camera, positioned to swoop in on our front row seats like a stalking pterodactyl unnerving the bejesus out of me and Beatrice, who sat directly in its cross hairs.
The context, which was not then given, would turn out to be nothing short of explosive. McBride, all hue and battle cry, served a sermon involving the fate of the dynasty. With each new pronouncement, we praised the Lord euphorically as the film-wielding beast bore down on us, with production assistants behind it gesticulating wildly to widen our enraptured smiles.
A single take, and it was over. We spilled out into a sun-blanched Goose Creek parking lot, back to the glare of our everyday existence.
In its final season, the show tracks the Gemstone bloodline to its first Bible-thumping huckster, Elijah Gemstone, during the Civil War, where so much of our country’s ongoing, fraught dynamic played out. As Elijah, Bradley Cooper trained his beguiling baby blues that glint with sparkle and sketch–the first notch in a Bible Belt tale converging sinners and Holy Men, Godliness and greed.
In recent years, I have steered non-American friends to the series. As the saying goes, it’s funny because it’s true. McBride and company may be in it first and foremost with the laughs, but that does not diminish the glaring realities the humor ingeniously leverages.
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