The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 Review: I Wish We Didn't Have To Say Goodbye To These Hilarious Characters In Funniest Season Yet
Danny McBride’s pitch-black comedy The Righteous Gemstones is back for its fourth and final season on HBO. The Righteous Gemstones season 3 ended with an explosion, a swarm of locusts, and a heartfelt family reunion, so the fourth season had a lot to live up to. With a mix of familiar faces and exciting new additions to the ensemble, the surprisingly sweet final season sees the Gemstones processing their grief over Aimee-Leigh’s death and figuring out a path forward.
Right off the bat, the premiere episode gets the season off to an exciting start. Without giving away any spoilers, it’s subversive and unpredictable, with a surprising guest star who knocks it out of the park. While it’s mostly disconnected from the main storyline, The Righteous Gemstones’ season 4 premiere sets the stage for the final season to definitively conclude the saga of the Gemstones and leave no stone unturned. From there, the season jumps all over the timeline, filling in all the missing pieces of the Gemstone family history before wrapping up their story.
The Righteous Gemstones' Cast Continues To Carry The Show
Megan Mullally & Seann William Scott Are Great New Additions To The Ensemble
As usual, The Righteous Gemstones is carried by its cast. The biggest tragedy of the show ending is that we’ll never get to see these actors playing off each other as these characters again. Despite being grown adults, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin never matured beyond adolescence. They’re still spoiled brats getting into petty squabbles as they compete for their dad’s attention. McBride, Edi Patterson, and Adam DeVine play hilariously into the characters’ bratty immaturity, while John Goodman provides a brilliant deadpan foil as their father with a saintly capacity for patience.
The biggest tragedy of the show ending is that we’ll never get to see these actors playing off each other as these characters again.
Tim Baltz gets some of the biggest laughs as the cast’s punching bag, B.J., while Walton Goggins continues to delight and show off his comedic range; the upbeat, acid-tongued Uncle Baby Billy is the polar opposite of Goggins’ current low-energy turn on The White Lotus season 3. Megan Mullally and Seann William Scott join the cast this season as Aimee-Leigh’s best friend Lori and her son Corey. Mullally and Scott fit into the dynamic perfectly, and Mullally brings her usual razor-sharp wit to the show’s humor while Scott joins Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin as a Tom Hagen-style honorary Gemstone sibling.
Season 4 isn’t just The Righteous Gemstones’ final season; it might also be the funniest season to date. The writers know their characters better than ever before, and the actors are more settled into those roles. Every episode has a handful of belly laughs from all over the spectrum of the show’s signature comic sensibility: blue humor, black humor, slapstick gags, biting one-liners, and jaw-dropping shock laughs.
The Righteous Gemstones' Religious Satire Is Aimed In The Right Direction
The Show Mocks Con Artists Who Profit From People's Religious Faith, Not The Faith Itself
The Righteous Gemstones continues to poke fun at the unscrupulous con artists who profit from people’s religious faith rather than the faith itself. But there’s also some great satire on the bleak absurdity of faith in the face of uncertainty. In one darkly hilarious scene, a minor character’s soliloquy about his blind faith that God has a divine plan for him, and his belief that he won’t be summoned into the Kingdom of Heaven until the Lord is ready to welcome him with open arms, is punctuated by his gruesome, unceremonious death.
But the show doesn’t just mock religion; it also touches on the good parts of faith. Kelvin has a really touching monologue — delivered spectacularly by DeVine — about how he reconciled his sexuality with his religious beliefs. Season 4 isn’t just the series’ funniest outing — this scene exemplifies that this is also the most heartfelt season of the show. It really feels like the end. There’s a lot of reflection on the past while also setting up a new chapter in the characters’ lives and radically changing the family dynamic. There’s a true sense of finality.
It really feels like the end. There’s a lot of reflection on the past while also setting up a new chapter in the characters’ lives and radically changing the family dynamic.
The season ends with a suitably riveting finale full of unexpected twists and turns. Similar to McBride’s earlier HBO hit Eastbound & Down, the finale sets up the expectation of a tragic ending, then subverts that expectation with a sweet, uplifting ending. It would’ve been nice to get final moments with a few more characters — the finale focuses a lot on the new additions, so some legacy characters fall by the wayside — but what matters is that the core cast of Jesse, Judy, Kelvin, and Eli end in a good place, and The Righteous Gemstones’ finale nails that.
The Righteous Gemstones follows the story of a renowned televangelist family, embroiled in a legacy marked by deviance, greed, and charitable acts, all under the guise of religious devotion. Released in 2019, the series explores their complex dynamics and the challenges they face in maintaining their public image.
- Network
- HBO
- Cast
- Danny McBride, John Goodman, Adam Devine, Edi Patterson, Cassidy Freeman, Tim Baltz, Tony Cavalero, Skyler Gisondo, Walton Goggins, Gregory Alan Williams, Jennifer Nettles, Stephen Dorff, Kelton DuMont, Gavin Munn, Jana Allen, Marla Maples, Eric Andre, Jeremy T. Thomas, Jason Schwartzman, Victor Williams, Lily Sullivan, Kristen Johnston, Iliza Shlesinger, Shea Whigham, Grace Junot
- Creator(s)
- Danny McBride
