Praise Be: One Of The Best HBO Comedies Ever Has A Perfect Ending

This article contains mild spoilers for the series finale of "The Righteous Gemstones."

After six years and four seasons, Danny McBride's hit HBO comedy, "The Righteous Gemstones," has completed its story. At least, the story audiences are permitted to see. The third HBO series from McBride and frequent collaborators David Gordon Green and Jody Hill under their Rough House Pictures banner following "Eastbound & Down" and the criminally underappreciated "Vice Principals," time will be incredibly kind to "The Righteous Gemstones," a show too smart, too funny, and too full of heart for its brilliance to be recognized on the scale it so rightfully deserved. The fact that the series (as of publication) never nabbed a Primetime Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series is downright criminal and, in a just world, would be the only sign anyone needs to delegitimize the awards circuit. Some folks just don't appreciate the gift of Uncle Baby Billy Freeman, I guess.

It's been lovingly proclaimed by "Gemstones" fans the world over that the show's righteous power is the normalcy in which characters say lines that no human being has ever said before, as if McBride and Co. decided that the divine blessing of speaking in tongues should be a juvenile grasp on the English language blended with profane descriptors that would require more than 10% income tithe to fill a swear jar. Lines like "I just felt a gush. So I need to go buy some tamps and go lay down," "I'm just asking for an eight-ball n' 2 million dollas," or describing the movie "Castaway" as the "Tom Hanks-by-hisself one" only work when you have a cast as gifted as McBride, Edi Paterson, Adam DeVine, Cassidy Freedman, Tim Baltz, Tony Cavalero, Walton Goggins, and John Goodman to deliver the good word.

"The Righteous Gemstones" was violent, vulgar, and ultimately victorious, merging God-fearing wrath with gotdang nonsensical hilarity through the lens of characters so flamboyantly ludicrous that you can't help but fall in love with them. The fourth and final miraculous season was the show's very best, bringing the story of the Gemstones family to its rightful conclusion without sacrificing its absurd sense of humor (and penchant for over-the-top violence) for sentimentality.

Season 4 debuted with an impressive flashback episode, where it's revealed that during the Civil War, conman Elijah Gemstone (Bradley Cooper) posed as a clergyman as the South succumbed to the North, his life spared by Union soldiers solely because they believed him to be a man of God. Elijah is the original drinking, scamming, blasphemous Gemstone preacher, and his generational teachings — sacred and secular — have only snowballed into the absolute maniacs that are Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin. At the show's start, "The Righteous Gemstones" operated almost like the Wario to "Succession." They're both centered on three children competing to replace their father at the top of the familial empire in the "rich people behaving badly" subgenre, but the characters in "The Righteous Gemstones" appear as if they were filmed through a funhouse mirror. 

As time went on, McBride pulled back the performative, superficial layers to reveal the way, the truth, and the life of the Gemstone family. Despite their riches, ignorance, and hypocrisy, they're a family of broken people trying their best who deeply care about one another. Their late mother, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), is mythicized in death, but flashback scenes prove that she too had her shortcomings. The fun of "The Righteous Gemstones" is knowing how truly appalling all of these characters can be, and wanting them to get it together and bask in the glory we know they're capable of achieving, regardless. 

Faith, family, and forgiveness have always been the anchors keeping the show from flying too close to the sun, and it's these three wise themes that ultimately offered the Gemstone kids their true salvation from themselves.

In the most intimate, sincere preaching they've done in the show's existence, the Gemstone trio asked God to forgive their friend as he lay dying for his shortcomings, traits they share with him. "Dealing with pain, Lord, it's hard. It can do things to you. It can make you feel helpless, and it can make you feel crazy," Judy preaches. "With all the doubts in our life and all the fears, help us let go, Lord," Kelvin pleads. "Sometimes we let jealousies corrupt us. Sometimes we don't think about how we act and how it affects others, and we do things we regret," Jesse preaches in confession. "We all fall off the path, Dear Lord."

And this touching moment of honesty took place immediately after Sean William Scott's Corey "Core-Dog" Milsap stalked them around the house with a gun while dressed like Michael Jackson and set to UB40's "Red, Red Wine."

Eli Gemstone gets his closure too, unsurprisingly through a letter written by his late wife to her friend Miss Lori Milsap (Megan Mullally), whom Eli has fallen in love with in this last chapter of his life. "Saying goodbye is never easy. It's not something I've ever been good at. Sometimes it's easier to never say goodbye and just leave things where they lay," she wrote. "Don't wrap it up nice and neat. Don't look for closure in a goodbye." It's precisely what Eli needed to hear to allow himself to retire and hand the reins of the Gemstone evangelical empire to his children, and permit himself to truly love another woman again. His final act as a man of God? Officiating the wedding of his son Kelvin (our reigning Top Christ Following Man, thankyouverymuch), and his now-husband Keefe, an ex-Satanist who refers to rain as "the devil's piss." If you know these characters, you know how poetically perfect this all is, but if you don't ... it sounds absolutely insane.

And that is precisely why "The Righteous Gemstones" is one of the best comedies ever written. On paper, everything about The Gemstones fundamentally repulses me, but these characters, in the capable, creative hands of one of the most talented ensemble casts HBO has ever brought together, make each episode feel like catching up with "the family." I have an incredibly fraught relationship with organized religion (I'm a lesbian from the Midwest, you do the math), and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that "The Righteous Gemstones" healed something in me. I'm still a heathenous atheist, but having a show look back at me each episode to say, "The people who made your life hell are just as lost as you are" (and the safe distance provided by it being a fictional TV show to process my complicated feelings about it) was the ultimate exercise in empathy. I can't imagine another show will ever be able to possess that kind of power ever again, but if one does, it certainly won't have as much full-frontal bible bonker on display.

Go in peace, Gemstones. Thank you, and Amen.