HBO’s Best Comedy Just Came to a Divine Ending

Creator and star Danny McBride on The Righteous Gemstones finale’s dark fakeout and the fate of the Gemstone family.

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This article contains spoilers for the final season of The Righteous Gemstones.

Even before its final season, The Righteous Gemstones was perhaps the single most ambitious project from creator and star Danny McBride’s long, rip-roaring career: an epic dramedy series about a Southern family’s televangelist empire—megachurches and gospel records and all—and its steady derailment following the untimely death of matriarch Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles). With the help of frequent collaborators (Jody Hill, David Gordon Green, Edi Patterson) and a top-notch cast (Walton Goggins, Skyler Gisondo, Cassidy Freedman), McBride spun out a bawdy, hilarious, and often tearjerking saga that sees the titular Gemstones reckon with their history of unholy schemes, struggle with maintaining their vintage and wholesome image in a fast-paced technological era, and throw out all sorts of ill-advised plans to keep their pews—and bank accounts—full.

The fourth and final season of Gemstones is somehow its boldest one yet, raising these heady themes and absurd dilemmas to heights that could only be scaled via jetpack. This chapter begins with historical scene-setting, showing us how the family’s forefather, the murderous rogue Elijah Gemstone (none other than Bradley Cooper), came to find God through a stolen gold-plated Bible and scenes of gruesome death. Then, in the present day, we watch retired Gemstone patriarch and widower Eli (John Goodman) do something unimaginable to both his children and the viewers: find new love with his dead wife’s old best friend, Lori (Megan Mullally). When the Gemstone kids aren’t physically retching at the thought of Lori replacing their momma, Kelvin (Adam DeVine) is grappling with his sexuality in a homophobic evangelical sphere; Judy (Patterson) has to deal with her injured husband, BJ (Tim Waltz), and his menacingly competent server monkey, Dr. Watson; and eldest failson Jesse (McBride himself) looks into his suspicions about Lori with the help of her son, Corey (Seann William Scott). Meanwhile, coked-up Uncle Baby Billy (Goggins) is as brazen as ever, demanding money from the Gemstone coffers to fund a youth-oriented TV show about teen Jesus, aptly titled TeenJus.

These staggering plotlines lead up to a series finale that surely hit even seasoned Gemstones-heads like a bomb: the revelation that Corey has long been helping his father, Lori’s deranged ex-husband Cobb (Michael Rooker), smear his mother’s reputation and murder all her post-Cobb boyfriends. Corey then turns his fire on the Gemstone trio, and for a wrenching duration of time, the viewer is left to reconcile with their all-but-certain deaths—before, in the show’s trademark gut-busting and gross fashion, the siblings drag their bloody bodies toward one another, coming back up to stop Corey’s rampage and save their family. It’s a daring, audacious way to cap off a show whose grandeur surpassed McBride’s prior HBO classics, Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals. It’s also a fitting tribute to all the ways Gemstones tackled its sprawling remit: a dark and savage tale of grief-stricken religious grifters whose faith in God and love for one another nevertheless run deep and true.

"They’ve been motherfuckers for so long, they needed to have a little comeuppance."

About a month before this stunning finale aired, I got a chance to chat with McBride over Zoom about the show’s conclusion and The Righteous Gemstones as a whole, covering this season’s most artful storylines and the ways that McBride’s own past and present are suffused into every bit of the show. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nitish Pahwa: My first question is about that fakeout in the finale. How’d you decide to put the siblings through a near-death experience?

Danny McBride: They’ve been motherfuckers for so long, they needed to have a little comeuppance [laughs]. No, but that’s what’s so funny about television, that people come with certain expectations. Even when a show is finishing, because we’re all sickos, the first thing that people think is “Who’s going to die?” It’s such a dark way to approach it, but it’s the truth. I am the same way.

A little bit of that was to just fuck with the audience—that why we’re not doing more of the show is we’ve killed everyone. But ultimately, that’s not what this show is. That moment at the end is supposed to strip the Gemstone siblings of everything. They’re brought down to some raw place, and they don’t have the benefit of their wealth, they don’t have the benefit of monster trucks or jetpacks. They’re put into a life-or-death situation where they have to rise to the occasion.

It’s really striking in light of this season’s first episode, which lays out the generations of death and scamming within this family. Yet they do get a happy ending. The siblings even find it within themselves to forgive Corey at the end and pray over him as he’s dying. I don’t often expect such emotional complexity in a comedy like this. Even in Eastbound & Down, as melancholy as it could be, you weren’t showing Kenny Powers’ ancestors exploiting others. Did you always have this broader arc for the family in mind? Or did it come to you as you were writing?

I knew at the beginning that I did want it to be a generational story. That was part of the idea of showcasing Jesse’s sons and Eli. Even in the pilot, where Jesse hits his kids and Eli hits him—the different things we unknowingly pass on through generation to generation. Obviously, religion is one of those things: The values your parents have are pushed onto you, then you have your own reactions to that, then you find what you push onto your kids. The further we get into it, you listen to the characters and to the story as it goes on, and you end up finding ways to tell that story that you never could have imagined when you were looking at the blank screen.

The ending of this was never going to be like, “The Gemstones get arrested and now they never can do it again.” I like leaving a story—especially ones like this that are character-based—up to the audience to wonder what happens next for them. It’s interesting to think about what Kenny Powers’ next chapters were after he finished the screenplay, or what befell Lee Russell and Gamby [from Vice Principals] after they saw each other in that food court. Who knows where this ends for the Gemstone kids? Who knows if that moment really did change them to make a step in the right direction, or if it’s just going to be more of the same?

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You’ve already hinted, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, that you might try to extend this on the road—a little Gemstones traveling show. Is that going to happen?

I think something like that could be fun. I will say that, out of all the shows I’ve made, this is the one where I could see myself one day coming back to these people. I feel like the world is so rich, and there are so many characters. Who knows, maybe one day there’ll be a movie or something outside the box like a traveling tent revival, where everybody comes and sings and preaches. And then we just take everyone’s money [laughs].

A lot of this is based on your current life in South Carolina, the Lowcountry, and megachurch culture in the South. You talked to pastors when you were doing research. Was there any specific history that informed the Gemstones?

Not so much one. It’s similar to when we created Kenny Powers. He wasn’t based on one baseball player. I didn’t even know much about baseball when we wrote Eastbound & Down, but it was what I would glean from headlines about different athletes—you take some of those character traits or salacious headlines and you figure out a way to boil it into one character.

I grew up in the ’80s, and in the South, the Bakkers—Jim and Tammy Faye—that was a humongous story in my region, where they’d built an amusement park. Also Jimmy Swaggart, when he had to apologize—I saw all that stuff, it definitely had an impact on me. We went to church every Sunday, and I don’t think our preacher was like that, but it was interesting, as a child, knowing there were people out there that would take advantage of people. I think a lot of people look at these superwealthy megapastors and the knee-jerk reaction is “What the fuck is this dude up to?”

What I always wonder is: Do they believe or don’t they believe? Some of these people getting insanely rich off the stuff, I bet you they believe, and that probably justifies some of the behavior, because that’s what prosperity gospel does. Like, “If we’re rich and famous, it’s because we’re doing the right thing and we’re being rewarded for it.” For Gemstones, it wasn’t anyone in particular, but the general vibe of what that ministry elicits in people.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how Americans—especially young Americans—are no longer going to church. I’m curious what you think of how churchgoing culture has changed, and what you wanted to pinpoint about it in the show.

Because I don’t go to church, I would feel phony giving some detailed analysis. But where people get their morals and values from, that’s not a given thing. People have to find ways to reach it. The entertainment industry to me is similar to the Big Church deal, that people are also not going to movies anymore. Entertainment is struggling to connect with people, to create things that entice people, to bring people in. Big Church, from an outsider’s point of view, to me looks like it could be the same thing: As times change and people change, you have to keep up if your goal is to reach as many people as you can. You have to figure out how you’re relevant in people’s lives. And if you’re not, why aren’t you?

I think that some of these crazy megachurch pastors, they do a disservice to the honest pastors because they give them a bad rap. If you already have your own holdups about going to church, then you go on social media and there’s a minister with $1,000 sneakers asking for money to get on a private jet, it pushes you away from that as a solution for problems in your life.

I grew up going to church and stopped going when my parents got divorced because everyone at the church treated my mom like an asshole. I carried that with me for all of my adulthood. I never was interested in going, because at a point when we could have used the support of the church, we were left outside of it. That was on those people at the end of the day. It wasn’t religion being something bad. But as I have kids, there’s a lot of stuff in the Bible, just about the basics of ethics and morals, that I’m like, “If I don’t take them to church to get this, then it’s up to me to make sure that this decency is translated,” because it definitely isn’t in our culture. It’s not when you turn the news on. It’s not even in the entertainment we’re being offered up. This show has made me think more about that: It is important to pass values on to people, but not to use values to keep people down or to make yourself seem like you’re better than other people.

Going off that, I’d love to know how much your own experiences with fatherhood, and with your parents, colored the familial relationships at the heart of Gemstones. Eli genuinely loves his kids, even though he gets sick of them. The void left behind by Aimee-Leigh is so aching that when Lori comes in, the kids’ immediate thoughts are: She could replace Mom? No, no, absolutely not.

With everything, you write what you know. None of the stories are what my relationship is with my kids, but you learn stuff from being a parent, from being a spouse. To take some of those things you’ve learned, or some of those inconsistencies you’ve witnessed, or places where you’ve fallen short, and to inject that into your writing to give things depth—hopefully it resonates with people, because we’re all trudging the same path together. That’s what storytelling is, I guess.

I find myself identifying with Eli probably more than I do with Jesse, in the idea that this career I have, it’s all-consuming, and you can give your self into it a million times because it demands that. When we write this show, I go six months being a zombie at my house. I take my kids to school, I sit up in my desk from 7:30 in the morning to 7:30 at night, my brain is mush at the end. My kids are telling me about their day, and I’m staring through them. I’ve been off at war and I’m trying to figure out how we can get Baby Billy to pull his dick out in the next episode.

Six months go by like that, and then suddenly I look around like, “Oh shit, I just missed a bunch of stuff. Even though I was here, I wasn’t here.” The show is all-encompassing and I care about it, so I want to put everything I have into it, because I want it to be as good as it can be. I feel like that’s what Eli did: He put everything he had into this business and into building this empire. Then there comes a point where the person who was doing all the upkeep on everyone’s growth is gone. Now he’s realizing how little he had to do to shape the kids, and how much work he has to do. So, in some ways, Eli is a precautionary tale to myself: You’ve got to fucking find the balance or you’re going to end up with kids that are complete disasters that curse at you and don’t respect you.

There’s a flashback from this season that really struck me, when Aimee-Leigh and Lori are walking and riffing about how awful it is to have kids. That surprised me a bit coming from Aimee-Leigh, who’s otherwise so adored by her children. But then again, she enabled her husband’s worst instincts. Combine that with the Season 1 flashback where the family’s at her deathbed, and they destroy the hospital ward while crying and swatting at a bee. There was this absurdity to Aimee-Leigh’s relationships with Eli, Baby Billy, and the kids. When you were writing this character, how did you decide what to reveal about her, and what to keep more mysterious, so as to maintain that image of holiness around her?

It’s the natural thing that people do, right? When someone passes, some of their flaws get brushed over because of how sad it is that the good parts aren’t there either. To the kids, Aimee-Leigh was an angel. And I think she was more morally in tune than any of them are. Kelvin is probably more like Aimee-Leigh than any of the siblings are, and I think Jesse has a lot of Eli in him around this idea of building, building and creating and getting more.

I think Aimee-Leigh did have a good heart, and I think she was a good person, but nobody’s perfect. It’s another way of showing that generational disconnect. I think Aimee-Leigh has contextualized how Kelvin, Judy, and Jesse see her in relation to their lives. That’s how she’s presented most of the time in the story. When you get those interludes and glimpses, we try to show those things that sometimes can be contradictory, just to show a bit of what the reality probably was.

Is that through line between Kelvin and Aimee-Leigh the reason she appears to him in that scene where he follows her ghost into the bedroom and finds the gold-plated Bible?

I don’t want to overexplain anything too much. I think that that could be a reason.

My wife’s father passed away a while ago. She tells me that she sees him here and there, he comes to her sometimes. It might be through a dream, or it might be with a song that comes on the radio where she can feel him. It’s a way of capturing that, how we all process it differently.

Speaking of Kelvin, this was a huge season for him in terms of his growth, his relationship with Keefe, and his owning up to his sexuality on a public stage that was so hostile to him, the Top Christ Following Man competition—which, by the way, is an amazing name for a show.

It can never be short, and it always has to be said. It’s ridiculous to say it.

It’s so good. It’s the opposite of TeenJus. 

I was curious how you thought of Kelvin’s development. Did you always have that idea for him, that he would come out and be more comfortable with himself?

It came as the character grew. That was also a way to show how Eli always chose work over other duties in his life. Where you meet Kelvin at the start of this is that Kelvin could go down that path as well, that he’s found a version of himself he’s comfortable with sharing that doesn’t hurt the bottom line. But that would have led to something that wouldn’t have been fulfilling for Kelvin. Through his love for Keefe, and ultimately his love for himself, he’s able to face that and decide that’s not going to be the route he takes. It’s an optimistic path that he’s choosing at the end. Who knows where it ends for Kelvin? But he’s at least doing something that his dad wouldn’t have done: choosing his heart, as opposed to commerce.

Going in a way different direction: Dr. Watson, BJ’s helper monkey. Tell me how you all came up with that.

Judy is someone who deals with jealousy, and deals with the attention that she wants and needs. She acts out in place of it. So I wanted to put someone on her path that made her have to face that. I didn’t feel like it should be a love interest—that felt insincere. BJ loves Judy with all of his heart. How could he not? So we were trying to find a nemesis for her that would allow her to see her own wounds. Once you do that, you have to figure out how to make it funny.

She comes back around to Dr. Watson at the end, even after he wanted to drop the blow-dryer in the bathtub, which was so funny. Was there a lot of CGI involved in that?

We do a combination with that stuff. It would be easy to make it all CGI, but we don’t have the resources to do that. So you try to limit what you need from the animal, then you compensate that with letting CGI take over where you need other things from them.

What inspired his name? I kept thinking of IBM’s bots.

It was a little bit of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but also, one of the executive producers is Jonathan Watson. He’s a good friend of mine, and sometimes I refer to him as Dr. Watson. I think I threw it in the script to make him laugh, and there was something about it that stuck.

Was that similarly how you decided to give Baby Billy his Cybertruck, and the mini-Cybertruck toy for his kids? 

When we were going through cars, to me, the idea of someone who looks like Baby Billy driving a Cybertruck just made me laugh. The Cybertruck looks like it’s from the fucking future, and Baby Billy definitely doesn’t look like he’s from the future. He seemed like the last person you’d see getting in and out of that truck. When we put it in the show, it was not such a lightning-rod symbol as it is now.

It speaks to the inherent ridiculousness of these things, right? You had the big monster-truck scene in the Season 3 finale, and that was a bit of catharsis. Whereas for Baby Billy, the Cybertruck seems so stressful. He’s worried about how much charge he’s going to have before he takes off.

Baby Billy don’t like charging shit. He likes to run them batteries out.

Last question: The music for the show is perfect. You go from gospel renditions to old-school country to the novelty songs Aimee-Leigh and Baby Billy sing together. Then you switch it up, like when Eli and Lori start making out and it’s Pet Shop Boys in the background. I’m so curious how you all go about music curation, because it feels like the heart of the show for me, even outside of the fact that Aimee-Leigh is a country singer who’s played by a country singer.

Devoe Yates is my music supervisor on the show. I went to college with Devoe, and we bonded during my freshman year, because I had a massive CD collection and he did too. We’re both into hard-to-find hits. Because Devoe was a filmmaker at North Carolina School of the Arts—where I was at—he understands how music can inform tone and story. We never write anything like “This is the song playing in this part of the show.” I always cringe when I read a script and someone puts what the song is in the script, because it is such an amateur thing to do. You have no fucking clue if that song is going to be the thing that matches the emotion of the shot or what the actor does. It’s thinking about the song too soon.

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Before I write any of the seasons, Devoe and I will share music. Even if I don’t know what the story is, I’ll talk to him: “Here’s the vibe we’re going for this year.” I’ll show him some tracks, he’ll start filling in tracks, and then we create a playlist that I’ll listen to while I’m writing. It might be a weird score from a ’70s movie, or some weird cover album from Africa—it’ll be such a hodgepodge of shit. Then, once we get into editing, we’ll start going back through those like, “What stuff really sticks?”

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Joey Stevens, who composes the original score, I talk to him before I start shooting and tell him who the characters are and get him working on stuff without him seeing any visuals, based on his understanding of the vibe. It all starts to influence decisions. This show in particular, with the country music vibe, that was an early tone thing for me when we started—that era of late-’70s, early-’80s country music that was playing in my house when I was a kid. When I was writing this show and starting to think back to my own childhood, those tracks started popping up and influencing what I wanted the vibe to be. It even influenced what Jesse looks like: I was looking at old records from Conway Twitty and designing a look there. I wanted these guys to be country, but I wanted them to be country cool. I didn’t want them to be hee-haw. I wanted there to be that moment where they think they’re badass.

A little more in the outlaw country vein.

Exactly, somewhere between outlaw country and Elvis. And that was so much fun, listening to all of those old country songs, being able to pull stuff like “All the Gold in California,” and then getting Sturgill Simpson to fucking cover it. That stuff was a blast. “Misbehavin’ ”—Edi, Joey Stephens, and myself wrote that song one afternoon. To see it performed, see someone like Jennifer Nettles sing it, and then Walton Goggins clogging—it was a blast working on the music on this thing. It was another element that made the show unique.

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