The Righteous Gemstones Meet Tony Soprano

Danny McBride is a genius

Hello! Occasionally I do these little rambling essays about things in the culture that I’m interested in and I think later this year that these are going to end up being for paid subscribers only. Not sure when that will happen, but if you can support this by chipping in, I’d appreciate it. Thanks as always for reading!

I’m still constantly surprised that I’ll meet people who don’t think The Sopranos is one of the funniest shows ever. Then I remember that we all have different views on humor and some people just want jokes and gags that don’t offend their delicate sensibilities, while others think that Paulie’s whole bit about shoelaces sounds like something Larry David would write. That, and it wasn’t billed as a comedy; it’s a crime drama, so viewers go into it thinking that’s simply what it is.

The Righteous Gemstones, on the other hand, is billed as a “black comedy.” I’ve been fascinated with that term for I don’t know how long, and I once found a book in a thrift store when I was younger that I’d say changed my life called Black Humor. It’s a collection edited by the late, great Bruce Jay Friedman, and includes stories from an interesting mix, from Nabokov to Pynchon, Terry Southern, and Joseph Heller, and it closes on a bit from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. In the foreword, Friedman writes, “It is called ‘Black Humor’ and I think I would have more luck defining an elbow or corned-beef sandwich.” I also don’t know how I’d define the sort of comedy Friedman was paid to collect and turn into a paperback in 1965, but if somebody pushed, I’d just tell them to look out the window or go on Twitter or whatever the hell it’s called now.

And that’s exactly what The Righteous Gemstones and I’d argue all of Danny McBride’s shows on HBO have been. They’re shows, but it’s also looking out the window at the worst America has to offer. And for a few years, I thought his first series on the network, Eastbound & Down, was his best, but Gemstones is better. It’s a dark comedy, sure. But it’s also the latest Great American Crime Family story.

I’ve thought about this a lot through the first few seasons. And since the latest one ended just a few nights ago, I’m going to make sure not to say anything that will spoil the season, save for one thing in the first episode, “For I Know the Plans I Have for You,” that was straight out of the playbook of any criminal character whose bloodline runs back to Sicily. Jesse sends his crew after a rival to beat the guy’s ass as a message. I haven’t gone and rewatched the past two seasons, although I do recall plenty of moments that felt like they could be part of a Sopranos storyline, that single scene cemented it for me. The Gemstones are hucksters, they’re criminals, they’re rotten people, but the genius of McBride is not too different from what Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola accomplished with The Godfather in the way he makes you feel sympathetic for all these rich, careless, awful people. They’re spoiled, but they’re also deeply damaged, and at the head of the table, you’ve got Eli Gemstone, the patriarch played by the genius John Goodman. His quiet wisdom hides some deep darkness and you know he’s done some truly bad things to get where he has, but more than anything, he loves his family. He’s the 2023 Vito Corleone. Some might argue that I’m wrong and that Logan Roy’s corpse is still cold. And yes, I loved Succession and thought it was a brilliant, often funny, look at a certain sort of family. But Logan Roy hated his kids, and the Roy family isn’t like other families. The Gemstones aren’t either, but they make their fortune by seeming like salt of the earth folks who have a direct line to God.

But Succession and even The Sopranos offer another way to appreciate how good Gemstones truly is. You look at the people that played the Waystar Royco brats and DiMeo crime family, and you see a bunch of names of people that are acting beasts. James Gandolfini was on another level, Michael Imperioli and Edie Falco prove time and time again they’re brilliant, while Brian Cox played my favorite Hannibal Lecter, Sarah Snook is using her post-Succession time to play all 26 roles in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray on a London stage, and Jeremy Strong says he’s not a method actor, but he’s sort of the current poster boy for the technique. That is to say, all those people can be and often are hilarious, but they took a different approach to acting before their iconic roles on HBO.

Gemstones, on the other hand, has brilliant actors who mostly took different roads. Goodman started out at the Public Theater and has had turns doing work by Becket and Mamet on stage; he’s also been one of the best things throughout the Coen brothers’ career and he was King Ralph. I don’t have to sell anybody on Goodman’s range. But the rest of the cast is filled with some of the funniest actors out there right now. McBride is the first on the list, even though his HBO characters all sort of blend into each other, but that’s sort of the genius of it. They’re all very much McBride, but we get to slowly peel away the layers and see Kenny Powers and Jesse Gemstone are screwed up for different reasons. Edi Patterson as Judy Gemstone is a revelation. She is the most chaotic, hilarious, but also troubled character on the show and maybe all of television right now. And the way Patterson plays her, like this Tasmanian Devil of hormones and unchecked rage, is wild. You have no idea what she’s going to do or say, and in a way, she’s like a character out of a slasher film because there’s no way to stop her. I won’t even start with Walton Goggins as Baby Billy or Tony Cavalero as Keefe, and the way I mutter “Yessss” whenever each of them shows up on the screen. Everybody in the cast is brilliant.

But most of the people on Gemstones started out or gravitated towards comedy. Adam DeVine’s early days were spent on stages doing stand-up and filming MySpace-era sketch comedy, Patterson was a member of the Groundlings, and Tim Baltz, another scene stealer who plays Patterson’s wonderfully dim husband, BJ, trained at Second City. The show is stacked with people who understand how to make people laugh, but they’re tasked with playing an organized crime family—except it’s not what we traditionally think of when we hear that term. But that’s what the Gemstones are. They’re the same as the Sopranos or Corleones. The only differences are location, background, and the fact that the show’s creator’s first instinct seems to be to make the viewer laugh. And if I had to guess, I’d say McBride is very aware that the laughter is a way to disarm viewers and hopefully make them realize that they’re watching a show about outlandish, fundamentally fucked people, but they’re also catching a glimpse of America in all its dark comedic glory.