On Sunday night, Max’s “The Righteous Gemstones” came to an end after four gloriously hilarious — and often surprisingly moving — seasons, with series creator Danny McBride providing one of the most satisfying finales in recent memory. Like the series as a whole, the finale walked the line between lunacy and poignancy, ultimately leaving its dysfunctional evangelists in a place of peace and resolution without sacrificing the outrageous laughs for which the series has become known.
McBride had mixed feelings about ending the series. “Even as I approached this season, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it the final season or not,” McBride told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “This is a very awesome show to be able to work on. It’s in my backyard. I love all the people I’m working with. But as I started looking for ideas for this season, it was pretty obvious that a lot of the ideas I was gravitating toward were about closure and about ending. So I just followed that.”
McBride was also nervous about overstaying his welcome, as so many other shows have. “What’s interesting about TV is that a sign of success is that you just keep going and going,” McBride said. “But sometimes that can be at the expense of the journey you’re trying to take the people on. I was really fearful of this job turning into something where I would sleepwalk through any of the seasons.”
McBride waited to tell his collaborators that Season 4 would be the last one, just in case he changed his mind. “I never made any sort of announcement to the crew or to the cast when we started that this would be the last one,” McBride said. “Part of it was because I wasn’t sure of what would happen while we were shooting the season. Maybe an idea will come, some sort of guidepost that says that this story deserves more. But as we shot, it was just more and more apparent that we were pushing toward ending and wrapping the story up.”
McBride was also wary of anyone acting differently on screen because they knew the end was coming. “Sometimes I notice that when a show is ending, you can see it in the performers,” he said. “You can see them saying goodbye to these characters, and I didn’t want that. I really wanted it to feel like the other seasons, and I wanted it to feel like it was doing its own thing and not veer into being too sentimental.”
When McBride did catch the actors telegraphing the fact that the show was ending, he made sure to cut those moments out — even when he was the actor doing the telegraphing. “I cut stuff out of the last episode where I could see in my own performance or in other people’s that this is the actor saying goodbye. It was very emotional as we got to the end, and everyone could feel it wrapping up. It was definitely sad, but ultimately it was important for me to stick the landing and make the story complete.”
“The Righteous Gemstones” is streaming on Max. Subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview at the top of the page or on IndieWire’s YouTube page.
