SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the series finale of “The Righteous Gemstones,” now streaming on Max.
In the end, “The Righteous Gemstones” said goodbye as only “The Righteous Gemstones” could: with a masturbating monkey.
Though most of the HBO series’ final episode, “That Man of God May Be Complete,” takes place at the titular televangelist family’s palatial vacation home, the last scene actually filmed was from the prior episode. After Sunday services, the Gemstones and their entourage have decamped to Jason’s Steakhouse, the gang’s favorite place to hold court and hit the salad bar. There, Dr. Watson — the capuchin monkey who acts as a service animal for BJ Barnes (Tim Baltz), a Gemstone in-law who’s been paralyzed in a freak pole-dancing accident — pleasures himself and smokes menthol cigarettes as the crowd eggs him on. It’s a very “Gemstones” blend of creatively crude and strangely sweet.
“Church lunch scenes are always my favorite scenes to shoot,” says Danny McBride, the creator, star, and executive producer of the four-season comedy. (McBride also directed the finale, sharing script credit with longtime collaborators John Carcieri and Jeff Fradley.) “We usually have a whole day to do it, and it’s everyone from the cast there and everyone has fun.” But that day last fall, McBride wasn’t in the mood to stop and smell the roses. He was just trying to make it through a grueling production that had already sustained such calamities as the devastation of Hurricane Helene on the “Gemstones” home base of South Carolina. Even that day, Baltz learned his mother had been in a car accident and wasn’t sure whether he could complete the scene.
“I was so obsessed with just getting it over the finish line that I didn’t really take pause to think about the weight of like, ‘Oh, we’re finished. We’ve done it,’” McBride recalls. But then Gregory Alan Williams, who plays Gemstone consigliere Martin, pulled him aside to express his gratitude. “As soon as we started talking, I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m about to start crying. Is this going to be sad?’”
Viewers may have had a similar question in mind as they watched the final minutes of “That Man of God May Be Complete.” In past seasons, “The Righteous Gemstones” has gone big before going home; in the Season 3 finale, a literal plague of locusts descends on a TV studio and razes it to the ground. But the series’ final action set piece is dramatically, terrifyingly stripped down. Enraged by the recent loss of his father, despite his role in it, family friend Corey Milsap (Seann William Scott) goes on a rampage through the Gemstone lake house Galilee Gulch, wounding all three siblings — Jesse (McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine) — via gunshot. For several agonizing minutes, we’re left to wonder whether this could really be the end for them, only for Dr. Watson to save the day when he fetches Jesse’s gun from his cross-body bag for men. (It’s certainly not a purse.)
McBride did, in fact, want to mess with his audience a bit. “Maybe it’s just because, as humans, we’re all sickos inside,” he says. “But when a show’s ending, my initial knee-jerk [response] is like, ‘Who are they going to kill off?’ It felt fun to play with that concept and really commit to it.” That meant a smaller-scale climax than “The Righteous Gemstones” had pulled off in the past: “It should feel haunting. It should feel scary and unsettling and oddly grounded for how ridiculous it is.”
Courtesy of HBO
But there was also a thematic reason to have the Gemstones face their final challenge on their own. “I always had the idea that in the end, they would be tested to see if they ultimately have what it would take to do this job, without monster trucks or jet packs or anything,” McBride says, referencing a couple stunts the series has pulled off in the past. “I always imagined that the culmination at the end would be stripped down, simple, back to basics, just praying.” So after subduing Corey, the trio pray for him together as he lays dying. The Gemstone kids already share authority over their family’s multimillion-dollar empire. Here, though, they work together on the fundamental mission that’s supposed to underwrite all the glitz, glamour and Prayer Pods: offering spiritual guidance to congregants’ eternal souls.
The moment also calls back to the season premiere, an episode-length flashback starring Bradley Cooper as ancestor Elijah, a thief who accidentally becomes a Confederate chaplain and finds God along the way. McBride wrote the premiere’s cold open — in which Elijah murders a preacher while robbing his collection box, then assumes his identity — several years ago. It took until the series’ home stretch to find a place to put the scene, and expand the idea into an explanation of not just where the Gemstones come from, but who they are.
“They have this roundabout way of attaining righteousness,” says Carcieri, a longtime collaborator of McBride’s dating back to their days in film school. (He continues to rep the University of North Carolina via T-shirt on our Zoom.) “So many of the things they’re doing are misguided and not on the right path, but at the heart of it all, they still do believe in God, and they still do pray in earnest.” Just as a career criminal Elijah, whose gold-plated Bible has been passed down through the generations, could become a sincere believer by praying for soldiers about to be executed, his descendants can be their best selves by helping a lost soul who just tried to murder them.
“This is who they are, in their blood and in their bones, and this is their legacy,” says Patterson, who wrote for the show in addition to starring in it. “Them gathered around [Corey], praying for him — I think, in a way, it’s even bigger than a full-on, massive action thing. It’s weirdly got more punch.”
The entire sequence unfolds at Galilee Gulch, played in the show by a mansion on Lake Murray, just outside the state capital of Columbia, that happens to be the largest single-family residence in South Carolina, at around 18,000 square feet. Finding the house was an enormous challenge for McBride and locations manager Kale Murphy; initial candidates weren’t distinct enough from the Gemstones’ other residences, and the search took so long McBride nearly called HBO to request a pause in production. But in a miracle that’s only fitting for a show about religion, Murphy cold-called the mansion’s owners, who agreed to let the “Gemstones” crew take over for two entire weeks. Even better, the house happened to feature a 16th-century altar imported from a church in England and repurposed into a fireplace. The piece became the backdrop to Corey’s big death scene.
The lake house was a corner of both Southern bourgeois culture and Gemstone lore that McBride and his team were eager to explore. “One thing I always thought was cool about the first three ‘Star Wars’ movies was, they would take those characters” and bring them into radically different environments, McBride says. “These are those characters in the snow. These are those characters in the jungle.’ I was always looking for, ‘Where have we not seen the Gemstones before?’” Galilee Gulch also played into the otherwise coddled Gemstone kids’ core trauma: they haven’t visited since the loss of their mother, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), just before the events of the show. Letting a house of that size sit untouched is an act of thoughtless extravagance. It’s also, in part, an understandable act of grief.
Courtesy of HBO
“We always knew the show was about dealing with loss — how to persevere as a family, even though they’ve lost their their matriarch,” Carcieri says. Another loose thread the writers had toyed with for years before weaving it into the final season was a romantic storyline for paterfamilias Eli (John Goodman) in a definitive act of moving on. Eli ultimately strikes up a romance with Corey’s mother Lori (Meghan Mullally), Aimee-Leigh’s best friend and musical collaborator. That storyline gave us the gift of Karen Walker and Sulley from “Monsters Inc.” in a passionate 69 — and closure for a family unit missing its center of gravity.
“The Righteous Gemstones” has always been a big tent spanning several genres at once. It’s partly a musical, and has some of the most ambitious action on television this side of “The Last of Us.” At its core, though, the show is a comedy, and whatever its parallels to “Succession” as the saga of three siblings squabbling over their aging father’s empire, it was never going to end on as down a note as Kendall Roy contemplating suicide.
After the showdown at Galilee Gulch, the ultimate ending of “The Righteous Gemstones” is at Kelvin’s wedding to Keefe (Tony Cavalero), his best friend turned partner once the deeply repressed youngest Gemstone comes out of the closet. Kelvin’s sexuality is accepted with an ease that may be surprising for a group of red state evangelicals, but leaves every Gemstone child in a happy, healthy, stable relationship. Even Eli and Lori decide to give things another go despite the Gemstones’ role in the death of her son and abusive ex-husband.
“Ultimately, the fun thing about the Gemstones is they win,” says Patterson, laughing. “Do what you fucking want to them. You cannot make them not win.”
McBride did toy with the idea of giving the Gemstones some final comeuppance for their many failings as people. (This season alone, they had Keefe dress in drag as the ghost of Aimee-Leigh to dissuade Eli from dating Lori.) “There were always thoughts about, ‘Does the church go down? Do they get arrested? And like, ultimately, for me, I don’t know if I really want to see that,” he recalls. “The design for me is, I want people to watch this again, and I want it to be something that ultimately feels fun.”
Though he jokes that his next plan is to “probably make a sandwich,” McBride is eager to move onto the next series that will join “Gemstones,” “Vice Principals” and “Eastbound & Down” in an unbroken chain of acclaimed HBO series. Along with Patterson and author Grady Hendrix, he’s developing an adaptation of the novel “The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.” Whatever makes it to air next, though, it’ll be in conjunction with the team at Rough House Pictures, the production house McBride co-founded with David Gordon Green and Jody Hill whose informal roster includes consistent presences like Carcieri and a local South Carolina crew that often carries over from project to project.
That relative consistency in an inconsistent industry contributed to the choice to end “The Righteous Gemstones” on its own terms. “Whatever we do next, those people will be a part of it,” Carcieri says. So as bittersweet as it is to say goodbye, “I have faith in the talented people that we work with that we’ll come up with something good.” Besides, McBride penned the pilot of “The Righteous Gemstones” in 2017; between four seasons, two strikes and a pandemic, making the show has taken up eight years of the Rough House crew’s lives, leaving them excited for a blank slate. “When we wrote that Civil War episode, it flowed like water,” Carcieri adds, “just because we were writing in this new setting, with new characters.”
“It’s part of why I kind of wanted to put a pin in ‘Gemstones’ for now, because I do see how much time creating a story and creating a show takes,” McBride says. No matter how much fun he’s had with these demented, selfish, slightly-more-grown-but-by-no-means-mature people, he’s making the very un-Gemstones choice to say he’s had enough for now: “There’s more stories I want to tell, and more things I want to do.”
