I love a good story about deviant preachers, so The Righteous Gemstones seemed right up my alley when it popped up on HBO. So what better way to test it out than to put it through a Trial by Stream?
The pilot introduces the Gemstones, a world-famous televangelist family that has managed to turn bringing people to Jesus into a lifestyle involving private planes, enormous mansions, an amusement park, armed security and enough money to make you wonder exactly how much Jesus is charging these days.
And underneath all that greed, hypocrisy and absolute ridiculousness, I think at least some of them genuinely believe they’re doing good.
That’s what makes this so much fun.
Welcome to the Gemstone Empire
The opening baptism marathon in China tells you almost immediately what kind of family we’re dealing with. They’ve baptized 5,000 people and return home enormously proud of themselves, complete with their own plane.
Home, of course, isn’t a house. It’s practically a country.
Patriarch Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) presides over a massive gated estate where his adult children have their own houses, there’s an amusement park, armed security has its own shooting range and apparently everyone gets around by golf cart.
Then there are the kids.
Jesse (Danny McBride) is the oldest son and clearly believes he could run things better if everyone would just let him do things the Jesse way. Kelvin (Adam Devine) lives with Keefe, a former Satan worshipper who still has a giant 666 tattoo on his chest despite having found Jesus. And Judy (Edi Patterson) is pissed because the men get to go on the big ministry trips while she gets left behind.
It’s a dysfunctional family business where the family business happens to be God.
The funniest part may be how quickly The Righteous Gemstones establishes that these people don’t seem to recognize their own absurdity.
Jesse walks around wearing religious jewelry while hiding adultery and drug use. His wife can dismiss criticism of their lavish lifestyle by blaming the devil for making someone question her. Eli talks about the mission while expanding into another town despite smaller local ministries warning that the Gemstones will wipe them out.
And when those pastors object? Eli offers to buy their ministries. Problem solved.
The Gemstones Believe Their Own Bullshit
It would be easy to make the Gemstones nothing more than cartoonishly greedy televangelists, but there’s something more interesting going on.
They don’t all seem like they’re knowingly running a scam.
Jesse, in particular, appears to genuinely believe in the mission even while behaving in ways that contradict nearly everything he’s supposedly preaching. The Gemstones have built an entire world where their wealth, status and privilege aren’t evidence that something has gone horribly wrong. They’re proof that they’re doing something right.
That makes the hypocrisy much funnier.
The best example comes at the Gemstone Salvation Center. After the family uses footage from the China baptism trip to remind the congregation about the importance of tithing, we see what happens to all that generosity.
There’s a whole back room counting the money like it’s a casino.
Of course there is.
The Gemstones aren’t simply wealthy preachers. They’ve turned religion into an empire and surrounded themselves with so much excess that nobody inside the bubble seems capable of recognizing how insane it looks from the outside.
But Johnny Seasons can. He’s a pastor from the neighboring community who finally calls Eli out publicly, accusing the Gemstones of being driven by greed rather than God.
Naturally, the Gemstones’ panties immediately get in a bunch. Anytime someone challenges this family, that’s what happens. They don’t reflect. They get defensive.
A Family That Sins Together…
The blackmail plot gives the pilot its story, but the Gemstone siblings are what sold me on the show.
Someone has video of Jesse partying, doing drugs and cheating on his wife and wants $1 million to keep quiet. Jesse initially tries handling it himself before reluctantly pulling Kelvin and Judy into the mess.
And watching these three turn on each other, defend each other, insult each other and eventually commit increasingly serious crimes together is hilarious.
Jesse and Kelvin have a contentious relationship, but there’s obviously real affection underneath it. They’re also perfectly happy joining forces to pick on Judy, who spends much of the episode being treated like the useless little sister.
Until they need her.
Then suddenly Judy isn’t so useless anymore.
She’s been skimming money because she planned to leave the family compound, and that hidden stash becomes their solution to Jesse’s blackmail problem. She also seems to have more common sense than either of her brothers, probably because she’s spent enough time on the outside of the Gemstone boys’ club to see things they don’t.
Their attempt to pay the blackmailers goes about as well as you’d expect from people who have spent their lives insulated by money and privilege.
By the time it’s over, Judy has run someone over and Jesse has taken the wheel and apparently driven over another one.
So we’ve gone from drugs and adultery to possible murder.
Very Christian.
These people are awful, but they’re enormously entertaining together. The more trouble they create for themselves, the more I want to watch them try to get out of it.
The Magic Is Gone
John Goodman’s Eli could easily have been nothing more than the big corrupt preacher sitting at the head of the table, but the pilot gives us hints that he understands something has changed.
His wife, Aimee-Leigh, has died. The family gathers around her enormous grave with its eternal flame, and Eli tells his children that the magic is gone.
Near the end, he’s watching old footage from when he and Aimee-Leigh were younger and building the ministry together.
For all the ridiculousness surrounding him now, there’s a sense that Eli may be looking backward and wondering what the hell happened.
Did this start as something they genuinely believed in before the money, celebrity and Gemstone empire swallowed it whole?
The pilot doesn’t answer that yet, but it’s the question that makes Eli — and potentially the entire family — more interesting than a simple televangelist parody.
Because the Gemstones may be hypocrites, scammers, adulterers, thieves and now possibly murderers.
But I’m not convinced they think they’re the bad guys.
That’s much more fun.
🔥 The Verdict: WATCHABLE
The Righteous Gemstones delivers exactly what I wanted from its first episode: a completely dysfunctional televangelist dynasty swimming in money, hypocrisy and its own bullshit.
The pilot introduces a lot of characters and an entire ridiculous Gemstone empire without feeling like an hour of setup. Jesse, Kelvin and Judy already work as a sibling trio, John Goodman gives Eli enough underneath the ridiculous cutouts and preacher suits to make me curious about how this family got here, and the blackmail story escalates into exactly the kind of disaster these idiots deserve.
More importantly, it’s just entertaining.
This is one of those shows you put on when you want to get completely wrapped up in someone else’s bullshit and have a good time watching it unravel.
The Gemstones are officially in the watch pile.
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