The Righteous Gemstones

Gemstones delicately balances the ridiculous and extreme with surprisingly subtle character moments that keeps the show from drifting too far away from legitimate emotion and humanity.

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.

Watching Jesse Gemstone squirm because of the troublesome situation he manufactured for himself is wildly entertaining. There’s nothing quite like seeing simpleminded cretins get their comeuppance, and viewers will see plenty of that in “The Righteous Gemstones.”

Where the series ultimately thrives, though, is in its characterizations, which transform in unexpected ways over the course of the first six episodes (which were all that was provided for press).

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Despite its proclivity for forced, flat subplots, The Righteous Gemstones is a compelling and humanizing study of its characters, the faith they profess, and the world they strive to proselytize.

Gemstones' subtler moments work better than its bold strokes.