The show bears marked similarities to its critically fetishized network companion ‘Succession’. In each, we focus on three entitled siblings, potential heirs to an empire built by their charismatically imperious father, and their desire, real or imagined, to transcend the implications of their birthright. But while the Roys of “Succession” are armored with stylish nihilism, the three Gemstone descendants, lieutenants in the family’s sprawling spiritual operation, are less mannered and much more recognizable. Even if they behave badly, even terribleYou can feel their reluctant desire for the morality they have always understood to be interchangeable with their privileges. Television’s depictions of religion often tended towards dogmas or sifting through atheism, but here’s one that dares to split the difference. McBride has made a career playing swaggering Southern Blowhards, making them so familiar they transcend simple ridicule and become almost poignantly human; ‘Gemstones’, too, has a fondness for its characters that parallels the humor it extracts from their shortcomings.
And the Gemstone kids definitely have flaws. The eldest, Jesse, is a pompous hothead whose default response to any insult is mild violence and who, despite his family man personality, has enjoyed the kind of partying lifestyle that would make Led Zeppelin blush in the early 1970s. His sister, Judy, is a flame-throwing libertine with an astonishingly foul mouth and a penchant for offense to her loving milquetoast husband. The youngest, Kelvin, is relatively sweet, but locked in a closet of his own making, deeply in love with his best friend and prayer partner.
Similar to a staging of “King Lear” at a monster truck rally, the show has a loneliness that underlies its frenzied energy. Much of it is provided by John Goodman, who brings a touching pathos to the role of the Church’s patriarch, Eli Gemstone—a man of humble beginnings whose best intentions toward his kinsmen only seem to multiply their greed and shamelessness. There is also the conscience of the family, his late wife, Aimee-Leigh, seen only in flashback. (And once like an ill-advised hologram.) We see her advice that “money isn’t everything,” but these words float by, heedless, against the ever-escalating size and spectacle of the Gemstone Salvation Center or the family reception. own theme park. Their Ferris wheels and roller coasters have replaced exactly the kind of village-like, small towns that represent the family’s own roots, but the Gemstones are masters of a great American skill: they can think of themselves as the salt of the earth. even while surrounded by Croesus-like wealth.
This year, “Succession” concluded its final season on a bracingly cynical note, suggesting that the four seasons of familial infighting were little more than a pointless afterthought in a cul-de-sac of the corporate world. ‘Gems’, on the other hand, indicate a brighter future. Some of the action in the first season involved Jesse’s oldest son, Gideon, who had scandalized the family by going to Hollywood to become a stuntman. By Season 3, he’s firmly back in his fold, arguably more mature than his own father and serving as Eli’s driver. The affection that develops between the two characters culminates in the season finale, where Gideon asks his grandfather if he can teach him to be a preacher – as if suggesting that the dysfunction of the contemporary gems could be a generational error caused by the biasing effects. of wealth and power. In its sharpest form, the show has satirized the unrepentant predation that marked the heights of televangelization, as churches were turned into spiritual money laundering operations. At its most generous, however, it has been remarkably forgiving, allowing any sibling to move toward something like self-awareness. This is a portrait of damaged people born in the redemption world trying to find something redeemable about themselves, constantly held back by the profit motive.
This isn’t the only fascinating view of the church on HBO these days. There’s also ‘Somebody Somewhere’, which just finished its second season. Bridget Everett plays Sam, a ruthless self-proclaimed outcast who has returned to her small Kansas hometown after the death of her sister. In an upbeat twist on the usual Hollywood portrayals of “viaduct” Christian America, Sam finds companionship in a church-adjacent “choir practice,” where she joins her best friend Joel, who is both deeply devout and openly gay. In the Season 2 finale, Sam—blessed with an extraordinary singing voice that she’s reluctant to use in public—sings “Ave Maria” at the wedding of a trans man and a cis woman. This is a rare representation of how religious community connects and enriches communities of all kinds. Stage-wise, it approaches the opposite of “Gemstones,” but what the two series have in common is a knack for finding the strangeness and nuance in American religion, a subject Hollywood has more often viewed as a zero-sum contest between the sane and the heretical. . . True salvation, both programs understand, may lie somewhere in between.