Season 4 of The Righteous Gemstones doesn’t try to redeem the Gemstones. It puts them on trial. Not in a courtroom, exactly, but in that harsher venue Danny McBride loves most: consequences that sneak up smiling and then punch you in the throat.
McBride’s Jesse Gemstone is still a walking sermon on insecurity, all teeth and tantrums, but this season finally lets the bravado curdle into something recognizably human. The loudest man in the room starts to realize volume isn’t the same thing as authority, and watching Jesse wrestle with that is the season’s quiet engine. Adam Devine’s Kelvin, meanwhile, leans fully into his identity crisis, which the show handles with surprising tenderness beneath the crude jokes. His arc is less about sexuality than fear of irrelevance, which makes it land harder than expected. And then there’s Edi Patterson’s Judy, still a glorious chaos demon, but Season 4 gives her moments of clarity that feel earned, not softened.
John Goodman’s Eli Gemstone looms like a tired Old Testament god, weighed down by legacy and regret. The show smartly resists turning him into a moral compass. He’s complicit, exhausted, and deeply aware that his children are both his sin and his punishment. That tension fuels much of the season’s best drama.
Visually, the show remains absurdly confident. Director Danny McBride and his team continue to stage megachurch excess like a baroque nightmare, all garish wealth and sunbaked Southern grandeur. The production design practically sweats entitlement. The score knows when to mock and when to mourn, often doing both in the same scene.
The Righteous Gemstones ends not with salvation, but with a grim, funny acknowledgment: faith may move mountains, but ego builds empires, and those are much harder to tear down.
RHFC Rating: 7/10 🍿
