The Righteous Gemstones

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.

The comedy’s most consistent and confident to date,

The sermon might be getting a little repetitive, but The Righteous Gemstones knows how to keep butts in the pews.

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.

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.

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.]

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.