With 'Righteous Gemstones,' Danny McBride Finally Sends It Up
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Danny McBride once described the kind of characters he plays as “fucked up Don Quixotes.” That was true of Kenny Powers, the delusional ex-baseball player who said some cringeworthy things, particularly to his girlfriend Katy Mixon, on his path to becoming a better man. (Case and point: “There is no I in team, but there is a u in cunt.”) The comparison works for Neil Gamby, too, a character McBride created who was even crueler and more mean-spirited than Kenny Powers for his follow-up HBO project, Vice Principals. But in his new show, The Righteous Gemstones, which just began airing its second season, McBride appears to be done with difficult men. The change comes just in the nick of time.
The pitch-black comedy Vice Principals, about a rivalry between two men competing to be the principal of a South Carolina high school, got off to a rough start in 2016. Many, understandably, couldn’t get past the first two episodes’ depiction of two angry white men burning down the house of their older, Black, female boss. Just a few months after the election of Trump, the parallels between the show’s aggrieved main characters and the new commander in chief were hard to ignore.
While Vice Principals ended up winning over some viewers thanks to its deep dive into the relationship between resentment and self-destruction, it also solidified McBride as the master of the difficult man character—just as that particular trope began to go out of style. Call it bad timing, but incidents of mass, white, male hysteria like the Charlottesville riots and the entire presidency of Donald Trump just made problematic men with bruised egos like Neil Gamby less fun to watch.
Whether it's a result of the gravity of the moment or his own personal journey outside of the larger cultural discourse, McBride's evolved on The Righteous Gemstones. The HBO comedy about a conniving family of televangelists marks a new chapter for the comedian, in which, for once, he isn’t playing the asshole; or at least, he isn’t the only one playing an asshole. Instead, the show takes a team approach similar to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and spreads the narcissism, idiocy, and obnoxiousness around an ensemble cast that includes the formidable John Goodman as the family patriarch, Eli Gemstone; Adam Devine as Jesse’s clueless younger brother, Kelvin; and Edi Patterson in a star-making role as Jesse Gemstone’s raucous sister, Judy.
Judy Gemstone is the closest The Righteous Gemstones gets to an anti-hero. She is outrageous, infuriating, and bawdy as hell. She has a habit of randomly describing how saturated her underwear is to her kind and reluctant fiancé, BJ Barnes (played by Tim Baltz), who never asks her for this information. In the first season’s finale, she tenderly reveals the depths of her sociopathy when she tells him about getting rejected by the school teacher she lost her virginity to. “He did a restraining order on me so I bought him a Jeep Grand Cherokee to prove I loved him,” Patterson says in what is now referred to by fans as the Outback Steakhouse monologue.
Ludicrous, confessional monologues used to be McBride’s territory, but he has since discovered a new conduit for comedy in all of his character’s reckless attempts to do right by people. In The Righteous Gemstones, he is no longer the man participating in a cocaine-fueled orgy with prostitutes. He is the man … standing in front of incriminating video footage of himself ... participating in a cocaine-fueled orgy ... promising his family it won’t happen again. “This is not who we are anymore, okay?” insists McBride’s Gemstone in the show's series premiere in 2019. The scene still allows for McBride to play the coke-shoveling idiot, but the comedy isn’t in the anti-hero antics. It’s in the mea culpa affixed to the end of each key bump.
In the second season of The Righteous Gemstones, McBride deploys his reliable buffoonery slightly more often. In a mid-season episode, which Esquire screened ahead of release for review, when Jesse Gemstone’s son says his Mom is the better shot—“Dad, can’t shoot worth a shit!”—McBride responds angrily. “What did you just say? I’ll shoot you!” Good idea, shoot your son. The overreaction is classic McBride, still funny after all these years, but what follows is a divine diversion from the dirtbag comedy arc he relied on so heavily during Eastbound and Down and Vice Principals.
In the next scene, instead of journeying deeper into the neuroses of the man with the bruised ego, in search of a redeeming explanation, McBride decides to send it up. Looming over a room full of men dressed like the Proud Boys, his character Jesse Gemstone delivers a punched-up monologue about the modern threats to Christian manhood. After riling the guys up, he then passes around a box of slings. Each one, he claims, is an exact replica of the sling David used to slay Goliath. “Feel that ancient masculine energy streaming through those bodies. Ancient killing power,” he commands through a clenched jaw. Cut to a shot of a dozen men in pressed khakis running through the streets whipping what looks like a caveman’s jockstrap around their heads.
"All these men around here are fucked up,” Judy Gemstone says, summing the thesis of the scene up nicely a few passages later. That's true, but the joke within the joke is that Judy is the most gloriously fucked up one of them all.
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