4 days ago
11
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the series finale of The Righteous Gemstones, “That Man of God May Be Complete.”]
When looking back on four blessed seasons of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, words like “anarchy” and “chaos” and “so much full-frontal nudity” might come to the surface. However, the Danny McBride-created comedy about a madcap televangelist family ended not with a bang but with a moment of quiet hope, as Gemstone patriarch Eli (John Goodman) found his longtime friend and recent lover Lori Milsap (Megan Mullally) waiting for him on the dock by his boat — asking to come on board.
In a recent interview with Consequence, McBride says that ending with Lori and Eli reconnecting “was always in there.” As the creator/star points out, the series began with the death of beloved matriarch Aimee-Lynn (played by Jennifer Nettles in flashbacks), and “this family spiraling, as they try to figure out what’s next. And each season, Eli has really been the face of that journey.”
In the first season, McBride says, Eli “is understanding all the things that Aimee-Lynn did to keep this family together, and he’s finding himself ill-equipped to deal with his children and help them and guide them. In the second season, he’s reminded who he was before he met Aimee-Lynn, and he’s unsure of who he is now. And in the third season he ends up having to make amends for the past and face his sister.”
Season 4, then, “ultimately is about [Eli] taking those hard steps to move into whatever’s next in his life. So the idea of it ending with him and Lori, to me — it just felt like it was a logical place to take the story.”
McBride adds that “I knew it was going to be tricky, because we’ve built Aimee-Lynn to be such an important lovely figure that it’s obviously very hard for people to get around seeing Eli with someone else. That was the beauty of what Megan [Mullally] brought — she really felt like a Gemstone. She could go toe to toe with them. And in the end, she felt like a fitting partner.”
It’s a sentiment the rest of the cast agrees with. “I thought it was a perfect way to end it,” star/producer Edi Patterson says. “Everything in the Gemstones family in some way trickles down off of Eli and what he’s going through, because I think they’re all so constantly desperate for his love and approval. So it was a very cool, understated way to go, ‘Oh, there’s hope for everyone.'”
“And it’s a beautiful way to mirror the end of the pilot,” her co-star Tim Baltz adds. “Where he watches the VHS of Aimee-Lynn and he watches it and he’s so sad. That does set everything off on this journey of everyone dealing with their grief. Every season is them dealing with their grief in a new way and coming to terms with it. So it’s nice to see them happy.”
While Eli and Lori reconnect in the final scene, that scene comes after the classic resolution to any comedy (at least according to Shakespeare): A wedding, which was one of the last sequences shot for the series. And Adam Devine feels that filming the nuptials between Kelvin (Devine) and Keefe (Tony Cavalero) “was such an awesome way to end the show.”
Filming that sequence, Cavalero says, was “intense,” given its proximity to the show’s wrap date.
“Tony cried a lot,” Devine says. “It was like, ‘Is Tony okay? Like, what’s going on?'”
“Yeah,” Cavalero confirms. “My lord. I was a bubbling mess. Legitimately, yeah. Because I couldn’t have thought of a better way to wrap things up for our characters. We had one more day [of shooting], but to see those fireworks, I mean… I literally kept doing this.” He mimes taking a snapshot. “I was taking mental pictures, trying to keep going ‘Don’t forget.'”
McBride says he’ll definitely miss the anarchy that was very specific to Gemstones, because “I always feel lucky that we’re able to do what we do and that we’re able to do it the way we do it. Any time you can feel like there’s no rules and you can do what you want, it’s gratifying as an artist.”
And that’s a key part of his process, he says, because “I don’t think I would write something or create something that was going to put limitations on me. I think, ultimately, I would always be driven by something where I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t want rules about where it can’t go. That’s just part of what’s fun about it.”
While the show won’t be continuing with a Season 5 (McBride’s decision), McBride does like the fact that the ending is an open-ended one. “TV has people invest because they’re curious about what’s going to happen next week,” he says. “And I think that once that’s satisfied, a lot of times people don’t go back and watch TV shows again, unless it’s a really good one. I know that that’s the truth for me. I’ll go back and watch episodes of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. But most of the time, once you know what happens, you’re not invested in going back and rewatching it all the time.”
However, he says, “I feel like from Eastbound to Vice Principals to this, I love the idea that when people finish watching it, they can imagine that those characters live on — the idea that your brain can concoct what comes next. I think that that’s just a good way to end a story.”
In fact, McBride adds, if the show ended and the audience felt like they’d seen “everything that ever happens” to these characters, then it would feel like “I didn’t do my job of like making them rich enough. So I think that at the end of the day, if you can walk away and anyone can imagine what comes next, I feel like then the story is complete.”
Patterson also likes the way that these characters’ fates don’t feel fully written, “because that’s how life is. I think they have ended in a place where there’s hope, and I think that’s the best thing we can hope out of for real life. I think that’s awesome.”
Baltz agrees. “And you can imagine their stories continuing, you know? The possibilities are endless. So if I were to come back, anything’s game.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t go like, ‘Wait, they already learned their full lesson. We can’t ever see them again,'” Patterson says.
Devine’s own head canon for Kelvin and Keefe’s future is that “the hard reality of being married would hit them — now they’re battling with the mundaneness of being a couple.”
Which, in this unpredictable media landscape, is something that could play out in the future. “The cool thing about this is, who knows?” Calavero says. “Maybe there’s a Downton Abbey-type Gemstones movie down the road, or a live show or something like that.”
“I would go to the Gemstones extravaganza,” Devine says.
“That would be amazing,” Cavalero agrees. “An Easter revival.”
The Righteous Gemstones is streaming now on Max.
English (US) · 