The Righteous Gemstones‘ Fourth and Final Season Starts in March
Photos courtesy of HBO
The service is almost over: The Righteous Gemstones is coming to an end with its upcoming fourth season, co-creator and star Danny McBride revealed today in an interview with GQ. The televangelist comedy returns in March with what will be its final season. Like Succession—HBO’s other series about grown failsons (and a faildaughter) struggling to replace a domineering dad as the head of a massive media empire—Gemstones will wrap it up after four seasons, which is the same amount of time Eastbound & Down, McBride and Jody Hill’s first HBO comedy, ran.
The Gemstone clan has been through a lot. They’ve been almost killed by murderous megachurch rivals, motorcycle ninjas, the remnants of the Dixie mafia, militia-style cults started by former family members, and at least one sociopathic Hollywood stuntman. Somehow they’ve stuck together through it all, without ever really growing wiser as people or any healthier as a family. That’s why we love them.
Like McBride and Hill’s other HBO shows (which includes the two-season wonder that was Vice Principals), The Righteous Gemstones has especially pleased us here at Paste with its all-encompassing (but not overly exaggerated) Southernness. Yes, McBride’s Jesse Gemstone is a cartoonish buffoon, like pretty much all McBride characters are, but the world he and his family exist in is a pretty accurate depiction of what the South is like right now; it isn’t portrayed as some kind of weird, exotic, almost foreign backwater, the way Hollywood so often does (see that first season of True Detective). And despite treating televangelism and the “prosperity gospel” with the absolute disdain it deserves, it isn’t a blanket condemnation of religion itself—something that’s important to note for anybody who’s ever tried to get their Southern grandparents to watch it.
Gemstones is the third series McBride and Hill have made for HBO, and all three have been great. It’s hard to imagine a better cast than this one, with McBride and his Vice Principals co-stars Edi Patterson and Walton Goggins joined by Cassidy Freeman, Adam Devine, Tim Baltz, John Goodman, and Skyler Gisondo, but we’re still excited to see what McBride and Hill do next, and have every reason to expect another classic. And hopefully they’ll be able to get that Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers spinoff on the air somewhere, already; I mean, TruTV is in the WBD family and has absolutely nothing going for it anymore. Give Baby Billy a half-hour, WBD. C’mon.