Fred and Loathing on The Internet

A Gemstone In The Rough Language

2026-Apr-25

The creative wheels turn slow over here at fredlambuth.com. There is a lot of inertia to get a review of a piece of media off the ground. To complete a full-blown blog post with copy and graphics published takes more than you think. It takes a lot of careful consideration for conjuring up les mots just!

Ruminating! A whole lot of ruminating going on.

To stumble right into a banal topic would be unfair to the reader. The salient points need to be considered. Sometimes in an imaginary storyboard meeting between the writing and graphics departments. We don’t just push out rubbish. Not intentionally, that’s for sure.

I saw all four seasons of The Righteous Gemstones recently. Probably finished the series over a period of three to four weeks. Finishing within a month or so. Watched among the many screens at home, with some web enabled device to pipe in HBO Max.

A month or so is recent enough to say my impressions are sufficiently fresh for an authentic Kerouac take on the subject. Yet that’s the same amount of time to have my thoughts on the subject baked in my psyche enough to also call it a Ginsburg take. For this TV series, I think I’ve honed in to the golden median of the Beatnik school of writing.

The Gemstones show has a stacked cast. More than the usual Danny McBride show. Stacked as this show may be, – and with the case of John Goodman being a contender for the role of ‘protagonist’-- it still has the feel of a Danny McBride show. This one being the third in his trilogy of semi-serious comedy shows on HBO.

This consideration of this show being a capstone to a trilogy might stem from watching Vice Principals immediately prior to The Fabulous Gemstones. Even if that chronological bias was the case, I do believe the behind the camera people of Gemstones are the same from the Danny McBride production company that made Vice Principals and East Bound and Down. This show has the smell of his kind of show and the people who made the last two. They all are set in South Carolina. When I saw that on this show, I had a hunch The Righteous Gemstones was going to be a production of the McBride-HBO formula.

We don’t exactly do fawning reviews here at the fredlambuth.com blog. If that is your interest, you will just have to rely on some other editorial source on how to numerically measure this show's creative score. I did consult some of those sites right after finishing the fourth season. In my consideration, the strength of the show tapered off with each season. Discovering on Metacritic.com that each season brought up a marginal increase in average critical and user scores was a mild shock. I say mild because I’m often wrong when it comes to discerning what gets the good scores among critics. Guessing what will get the bad scores is an easier game.

What is it that the critics liked better in each season? That there was payoff for some slow burning storylines that come to fruition after the many seasons? That is not what I saw at all. Each season was a remake of the last season. There was very little foreshadowing of upcoming seasons. Each one brought a set of characters that were not to appear again.

On face value that sounds like a recipe for boredom by the second season. That could be, but what kept my interest was the novelty of how each season scrambles the parts. They were well made and placed parts. The second season’s composition was somewhat obvious given the first season. The characters were still funny enough and the situations they were in gave them plenty to work with. By the third season that was getting tiresome. Discovering that the third time around is indeed a remake of season one and two put a crimper on enjoying a fourth season.

The fourth season had me finding repeatedness of the story elements at every step. Enough to say that I engaged the least amount with. Probably walked out of the room, looked at my phone, or fell asleep with season four more than any of the others. That’s a strong metric for interest in a TV show around here.

That first season of The Fabulous Gemstones landed with a great skid my first time around watching the show. Back in 2019, when the first season premiered. When it was new. I had watched most, if not all of the first season. Great as it was back then, I had the feeling that the second season would be another whirl through the half-dozen or so well delivered characters doing their thing. Each of the cast did a great job in season one. Enough that I thought there was nothing more to be gained by watching another.

There was a lot of novelty there. That is ultimately what I want when watching some new TV show. Getting me interested enough to sit down and have the chance of getting into a new show requires that the show have one thing: anything. It could be a gimmick. A bizarre premise. Stunt casting. Those do not guarantee I’ll try it out, but something like that is necessary for it to happen. I’ve got the comfort of Frasier and Seinfeld at any time. That ‘les mots just’ stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph happens on the media consumption side too. I’m not going to watch some show that's supposed to be real good when its about ‘cops’ or ‘doctors’. How blasé.

The novelty in the cas of The Righteous Gemstones was the mixture of American style televangelism delivered by the foul mouthed production of Danny McBride’s friends. That first season did make the so obviously hypocritical subject of wealthy televangelists funny in a not so obvious way. I have at most only the passing knowledge of what mega-church attendance culture is like. I do know more trashy Southerners. I found this show to deliver on the promise of showing what late 20th century trashy southerners would be like if they had oodles of cash. The hypocritically acquired gains from selling Christian virtue opened up the range of what well scripted amoral buffoons can do onscreen.

For nine episodes, that was interesting enough to see skilled comedic screenwriters find interesting ways for three very loutish spoiled children of self-made televangelists to say funny stuff in funny situations. Getting to that second season vindicated my prediction that further seasons were not going to be a redefinition in the series development. Not a bad addition or a waste of time. A good product refining from the first iteration. Had I absolutely adored just how horrible each of the main characters are supposed to be or how they talk, then I would have to be making a fawning review when talking about this show.

Critics do love when TV shows have character throughout a series development. To say that happens in this show is not something I find genuine. Most of the main cohort of characters are the same people going into the series as they are going out at the end of the series. Minor characters do work with the less screentime they have to be different in the new situations. Not enough to say each season was a meaningful addition to a richly narrated character.

Yes, the Gemstones have changed the settings with each season. Reconfigured the plot of each main character having to deal with violent opponents that start mysteriously and reach a violent climax on episode eight of nine. Indeed those parts move. The breaks between seasons really do a lot of off camera character decisions.

The breadth and width of the cast is so large that each nine episode season only has so much runtime to offer everybody. Not only the sparse runtime, but each season usually had a flashback episode that did have entertaining mini-cinematic features. However they were hogging screentime from a story that needs all the run time of its allotted nine episodes.

There is a data flow theory here about how many characters you can have on screen and each character ratio to the total and average. The side characters other than the three mouthy siblings are far more interesting to me. Had they had more of a chance to be more than attachments to the actual Gemstones then this review would be closer to fawning than just merely being amused.

The Vaseline on the screen effect of the de-aging used for John Goodman and others on this show put me off. My gut says they should have used a younger actor. That is the most obvious tried and true method to do flashbacks in a movie. If not that, then I would prefer the same effect be applied to all the actors’ faces. Perhaps if everybody had a slightly blurred and sluggish face it would not be so unsettling to just have one ghoulish apparition draped over a human head. In the particular case of this show about a televangelist, John Goodman having a neckline where his makeup and his skin having a contrasting line was a fitting situation that nearly excuses the unsettling de-aging camera technique.

Flashbacks of the child versions of the siblings are themselves entertaining up to a point. This extends the point that the three siblings never change. The situations in which the show moves offers new chances for them to speak. It will be almost always a predictable response. Some desperate reaction that insults.

What made the writing compelling enough in that first season and each one after, was to use these characters' incredibly narrow set of emotional and communication skills to express authentic feelings. These were real characters underneath the funny but quickly boorish delivery. It took about nine 40 minute episodes of appearances for that to come through. To get past the fact they are superficial characters, but plausible and well narrated one-dimensional characters.

In every situation they will still deliver their preferred way of talking. Even in extreme situations. They will taunt, react, get defensive before a response has been made. They are sketch comedy characters paced well enough between well laid scenes. Deep down in these well crafted superficial character’s hearts, there is stuff other than the oldest brother posturing masculinity, the sister stumbling to appear sexy, and the youngest brother working hard to look cool. That is the conundrum of what I found appealing about this show. Each horrible character is funny. Giving too much screentime and dialogue to each throws that balance off and they just become horrible.

Each season does an okay job of showing a reason to care about them despite their horrible traits. There is so much shouting among the regular cast that the high stakes dramatic action heavy episodes that happen in the later episodes of each season can not rely on using shouting to show the danger of the situation. I have the feeling if the show were to cut down half of all the main characters yelling insults among one another, there would only be enough runtime for seven episodes per season.

So the official fredlambuth.com word on The Righteous Gemstones is that there could have been something great if each season had less screentime of the three protagonists. Boy, this is some pie-in-the-sky wishing, but seeing one layer of the mega-church per season would have been so much more gripping. Let the Gemstones be occasional oddities that are recurring characters to people who are the employees of this mega-church business. I want a whole season of Martin Imari and how the church does business. That sounds much better than another round of the Gemstones family being ribald once more in a new setting.