The Righteous Gemstones Is TV's Other Great Show About Succession
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“When we were first creating the show, we were thinking of Dallas and Falcon Crest and Dynasty,” says Danny McBride, the creator and star of The Righteous Gemstones, now in its second season on HBO. “In the '80s, there were all these wealthy-family nighttime soap operas, and that was part of our inspiration.”
What the series creators didn’t count on, however, is that they weren’t the only ones thinking along those lines. “We shot our first season at the same exact time that Succession started shooting,” McBride, who has yet to watch that other series, says. “It's similar themes, from what I've heard, just a different approach; the same thing with Yellowstone.”
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Families battling it out for power, fortune, and control—of a global media conglomerate, a Montana ranch, or almost anything else—scratch an itch for audiences, a reported 9 million people tuned in to watch Yellowstone’s season four finale earlier this year. What Gemstones, which follows a family that runs a wildly successful megachurch, does differently is to lean into the humor—high-brow and raunchy alike. Yes, it's another dynastic drama but instead of taking its characters too seriously, it revels in farce of fame and fortune. “Really, what we wanted to do was just entertain the fuck out of people with this,” McBride says. “Let's try to just make this thing such a wild roller coaster of a story.”
To catch you up on the twists and turns so far: the first season of the series introduces mega-minister Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) and his children, Jesse (McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson), and Kelvin (Adam Devine). They’re all grappling with the recent death of matriarch Aimee-Leigh Gemstone (Jennifer Nettles), a former child star and the moral compass of the family, and not doing so well. Jesse finds himself embroiled in a potential scandal when an unsavory video of him threatens to be leaked, Judy aligns herself with her crooked uncle (Walton Goggins as the deliciously awful “Baby” Billy), and Kelvin bumbles through his job as a youth pastor and an are-they-or-aren’t-they relationship with Keefe, his best (and perhaps only) friend and henchman.
In the second season, which premiered in January, things are only getting more intense. As Eli’s kids begin seriously sweating the role each of them might play in the family business—one, it must be said, that none of them are remotely qualified to run—the entire organization begins to run up against the kind of challenges that could ruin it entirely, from real-estate boondoggles to buried secrets and exceedingly intense threats of bodily harm from incredibly violent bad guys. If this were all happening to the Roy family, it might be just another day, but on Gemstones it’s larger than life—and that’s on purpose.
“They're like country music rock stars,” McBride explains. “They're very much from a small town in the South, and when they do have money, they spend it on roller coasters and silly stuff. It's fun to think about when someone has money, a character has money, what they would choose to spend it on, because it says a lot about how that character thinks and what makes them tick.”
He goes on, “That’s the blessing and the curse of the Gemstone fortune, is that in this season we see that Eli came from nothing and built this empire, and that journey has taught him lessons and built character. Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin have been handed this, and in doing so, they've been robbed of growth that would make them well-rounded individuals. They're floundering as they try to stand on their own two feet.”
But the show isn’t without heart. In addition to scandals, power struggles, and brushes with death, the current season also offers moments of growth to its characters—and occasionally, they’re not too self-centered to take advantage of them. “I like the idea that at the end of the day, as much as this trio of kids are assholes, they do really love and need each other,” McBride says. “They're having to rely on each other more and more to figure out how they keep moving forward. They understand that.”
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