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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
44
Mixed:
9
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Mar 10, 2025
Season 4 Review:
The show’s fourth and final season, which starts Sunday on HBO, finds McBride and his ridiculously talented band of collaborators going out on top, and at the top of their game. It’s only March, but if The Righteous Gemstones’ capstone season ends up being the best thing on TV in 2025, it will have been a good year for TV indeed.
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Mar 6, 2025
Season 4 Review:
For half a decade, The Righteous Gemstones has quietly been one of the best comedies on television, providing laughs and joy to anyone with a sick sense of humor and possibly a touch of religious trauma. The fourth and final season, which premieres on March 9 on HBO, is no exception and proves to be a hallelujah of a sendoff to one of television’s most underrated hits.
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The Daily BeastJan 10, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The beauty of McBride, Green and Hill’s small-screen triumph is the way in which it couches its over-the-top exclamations in fittingly lewd and preposterous scenarios. McBride’s Jesse is the corrupt soul of these proceedings, his arrogant greed and ambition almost as great as his pathetic longing for validation from both his father and his peers (at whom he sneers). He’s complemented by one of the best casts in television.
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ColliderJan 7, 2022
Season 2 Review:
This new season of The Righteous Gemstones is the first great comedy show of 2022, a brilliant combination of insanity and surprising heart. Even though McBride has proven his excellence in television before, Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones feels like a step above what he’s already done.
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Screen RantAug 28, 2025
Season 4 Review:
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.
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RogerEbert.comMar 6, 2025
Season 4 Review:
At various points the different branches of stories feel a bit disjointed, and it’s clear the shooting schedules of various cast members prevented them from being in scenes that feature an ensemble. But it doesn’t matter. “The Righteous Gemstones” is funny, wry, clever, disgusting, moving, shocking, and endearing in ways that are purely aspirational for most comedies on TV, and I’m sorry to say goodbye to it.
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Mar 6, 2025
Season 4 Review:
The strength of The Righteous Gemstones has always been its characters and the top-to-bottom perfect performances of its exemplary cast. That’s still true with this final season, even as it builds to a thrilling but stressful conclusion that almost turns into a Southern-fried Grand Guignol.
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Jun 15, 2023
Season 3 Review:
Danny McBride's shows have always felt timely in their own unique way, but the third season of The Righteous Gemstones might be the most in tune with the current moment. It's a hilarious and mordant satire of those who use their power and privilege to exact a moral vision that runs contrary to their own way of living.
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Jan 10, 2022
Season 2 Review:
It’s certainly not for everyone, but if it is up your alley, it elicits tears-streaming-down-your-face laughter, the kind of horrified guffaws only McBride and his team can deliver. ... All the hi-jinx and hysteria and humor are what make The Righteous Gemstones a thorough joy, but the deeper questions are what make it memorable, a true gem in a sea of shallow content.
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Mar 6, 2025
Season 4 Review:
To the very end, The Righteous Gemstones remained true to itself — while never forgetting that it’s a comedy, going balls-out with its humor at the right moments. (Sometimes quite literally, thanks to Goggins.) The only difference with these final episodes is that like its characters, it grew up just a little bit along the way.
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IndieWireJan 10, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Goodman is more than up for the task, but he’s also just an incredibly sharp comedic performer. Seeing him get a little silly, in moments broad and specific, make for some of the season’s greatest joys. And that’s what “The Righteous Gemstones” boils down to: joy, joy, joy, joy down… somewhere below their hearts. Don’t worry about the power plays, just enjoy the bigness.
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IndieWireAug 14, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The lack of searing commentary is a bit of a letdown looking back over the first six episodes, but there’s still potential. Putting characters first is rarely a bad idea with ongoing TV series, and McBride ensures viewers will want to keep coming back just to see more of what this cast can do.
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Aug 13, 2019
Mar 14, 2025
Season 4 Review:
While “Gemstones” doesn’t bite the religious hand quite the way it did in previous seasons, it does conclude without a big sermon. Aimee-Leigh might have delivered the message in song. But the way Jesse, Judy and Kelvin do it is quite good – and just the farewell we need until they return with a big “Gemstones” movie.
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Jun 20, 2023
Season 3 Review:
The direction of Gemstones, together with its whip-smart editing and consistently top tier music cues, helps push the series toward darkness as much as the unscrupulous behavior by its characters. It also has its garish heart revealed in riotous costuming, bizarre framing – get a load of the gleaming white spires and towers of the gilded Zion’s Landing – and craven decision making, which only makes the world it’s built for itself come even more weirdly to life.
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Jun 16, 2023
Season 3 Review:
The show isn’t making new points about the hypocrisy of for-profit worship. It just underscores them in ever more audacious ways: with monster-truck rallies and racing cars and episode-length flashbacks and a poolside music video starring Walton Goggins’ veneered crooner Baby Billy dressed as a giant oyster.
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RogerEbert.comJan 7, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Luckily, the writing on “The Righteous Gemstones” is so densely packed that every subplot that sags is balanced by one that works. The season even gets surprisingly action-packed with a number of scenes in the back half that are like an ‘80s Cannon movie (that's a good thing).
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Jan 7, 2022
Season 2 Review:
In its totality, what makes this second season of The Righteous Gemstones succeed despite how off-balance its early episodes feel is the sense that, rather than taking only easy shots at people who use Christianity as a shield against rightful accusations of them, McBride and his collaborators have probed deeper into the transformative nature of belief and why it makes such people act that way at all.
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Jan 6, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Plot’s never really been what I look for in a McBride show, though. No matter how ridiculous they get, they’re still rooted in a recognizable reality and a detailed eye for how people live and talk in the modern South. That attention to detail is readily apparent in this season’s flashbacks.
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Aug 12, 2019
Season 1 Review:
“The Righteous Gemstones” clicks along for a couple of episodes, then hits high gear when Walton Goggins shows up as Baby Billy Freeman, Eli’s late wife’s brother. ... Tossing him – a propane tank of emotions – into a volatile mix like this enhances what already was a comic firestorm.
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Aug 8, 2019
Season 1 Review:
HBO's new comedy The Righteous Gemstones is likely to resonate with the audience that embraced his previous HBO comedies and perplex those requiring more conventionally "likable" characters. ... The Righteous Gemstones is coarse and enthusiastically performed, with punchlines that don't always hit for me, but the first six episodes have highlights of surprising potency.
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Jun 20, 2023
Season 3 Review:
The premiere episode reset the family, reminding us who they are and what they’ve been through, slowly introducing characters that will get shaded in later. But it’s episode two where the show really stakes its claim and takes over. [The score is the average of grades for the first two episodes.]
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Aug 19, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The series premiere is an hour long and that’s just fine because we’re just meeting his family and there’s a lot of soak in. But subsequent episodes running as long as 40 minutes seem padded. Feels like this should be a half-hour show. Remarkably, even as we’re shaking our heads at the hypocrisy of these people, by the fourth or fifth episode we have come to like these characters and we start to care about what happens to them. Well. Some of them.
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Aug 16, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The good news is that the other characters are getting there, both emotionally and satirically. With each episode, the church, the dimming light binding these characters together, is crystallizing into a symbol of the spiritual void left by Aimee-Leigh’s absence. That emptiness needs to be filled somehow, and The Righteous Gemstones is best when it confronts both that need and the needs that bring anyone into a spiritual community.
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Jun 20, 2023
Season 3 Review:
The series builds scene after scene on the blustery pleasures of its characters’ inarticulacy and delivers a virtual dissertation on unwarranted bravado. (I may never stop thinking about a scene in which Patterson makes glorious, nontraditional use of her index finger.) That said, its main plot is easily the show’s weakest.
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RogerEbert.comAug 14, 2019
The PlaylistJan 10, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Season two of “The Righteous Gemstones” is an ambitious, intermittently hysterical mess. McBride and Hill attempt to expand the show outward, often into full-on action set pieces that, while impressive, fail to find cohesion with the rest of the series. Coupled with forgotten plot lines and lost characters, it’s a disappointing step-down.
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Aug 16, 2019
Season 1 Review:
While “The Righteous Gemstones” does indeed partake in some rather low-hanging fruit as it mocks the megachurch milieu (where the prosperity gospel rains its flashiest blessings upon those who preach it), it occasionally hints at some stronger potential. Mostly the show comes off as an unfinished, vaguely Coen brothers-flavored gumbo of broad stereotypes, violent occurrences and snakey retributions among a family whose holiest instincts were long ago subsumed by their contempt for one another.
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Aug 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Judy isn’t distinct enough from her brothers. Worse yet, she occupies the same role that so many of McBride’s other female creations have before her: that of a screeching scold. ... All of which might be forgivable if the series dug deeper into its other ostensible targets: televangelism, the prosperity gospel, and broader aspects of evangelical culture. But at least in its first six episodes, the show barely scratches the surface before reverting to a more conventional crime-dramedy mode.
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Aug 9, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Its best asset, a premise that can open up to sharp commentary and granular sociological depiction, is lost. Not merely does this series have little real perspective on what goes on in the family church services, but its push to redeem Jesse seems to seek a depth and soulfulness neither script nor performance consistently serves.
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ColliderAug 16, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The show doesn’t lack style, but it’s shockingly weak on substance given its singular setting. Instead of plunging us into the world of televangelism, The Righteous Gemstones is just another group of wealthy jerks who happily bicker amongst each other when they’re not scraping everyone else off their shoes.
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Aug 15, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Despite the abilities of the cast, McBride’s touch is too heavy, and before long, we yearn for some heavenly force to smite Jesse, just to get him to stop cursing, insulting everyone and strutting around in total blowhard fashion. ... It’s not clear what exactly it is trying to do. And it’s not funny enough to make us want to keep watching.
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