![]() ![]() ![]() Hilariously, he grasps at the very first thing he sees: an old episode of Family Feud, back when Richard Dawson hosted and used to kiss all the female contestants on the mouth. He’s mostly right, though true famous people probably also know that career trajectories tend to dip after a few decades, not rise and fall, and he hasn’t been a star for a very long time. “Everybody that’s famous knows that true famous people go through different phases on the being-famous train,” Billy tells Tiffany when he gets back to the penthouse. But the clever opening suggests his restlessness, toggling back and forth between the fantasy of swooning fans hanging on every verse and the sad reality of “basic Christian sun bums” doing cannonballs in front of him. It’s not a bad job, really, to live in the penthouse with Tiffany and their son Lionel while sipping free piña coladas. His current gig is performing 24 shows daily at the pool lounge at Zion’s Landing, adding an aquatic clamshell theme to a sequined getup that wouldn’t be out of place in Reno’s saddest casino. In other developments, Baby Billy is back! The inspired cold open finds the once and future televangelist star in a relatively low place, perhaps not as bad as selling COVID-fighting elixir out of a hitch-trailer, but not nearly the height of his childhood fame. As usual, the siblings are just slow to realize their father was right. This simple moment of cooperation in the face of potential tragedy unlocks something in all of them. When Karl’s inadequate chewing lodges a chunk of dinner in his throat, it takes a group effort for the Gemstones and Chuck to save the big man. As Eli is trying to convince them to treat their first cousins as family and make them comfortable, they catch Chuck and Karl peeking out from the windows above and “ducking down, Haunted Mansion–style.” Later, Kelvin describes them to Keefe as “diarrhea people,” unworthy of Keefe’s warm sausage dip, but a mishap at the party turns the whole relationship around. They’re annoyed that Chuck and Karl are complaining about staying in Daddy’s mansion and pigging out in plush bathrobes. In the lead-up to Cousins Night, the siblings want nothing to do with the Montgomeries. ![]() But they’re also capable of looking down their noses. ![]() How could these yokels swim in that filthy trout pond? (“I feel like I’m up in the zoo right now watching the gorillas get washed,” says Judy.) And what’s with Karl’s unruly tufts of pubic hair? (BJ, in a rare and magnificent cutdown, shouts, “Holy smokes, what’s Karl got cooking under his trunks?!”) Money has turned the Gemstones into symbols of grotesque prosperity-Bible excess, with their monster trucks and gold-trimmed private jets. But to see the Gemstone siblings and their spouses on Cousins Night, sipping cocktails while trading snarky jokes about their ill-bred kinfolk Chuck and Karl, you’d think they were at a Wambsgans soirée. The Gemstones are nouveau riche hicks, the Roys old-money urban snobs. When the new season premiered, I compared the Gemstones to the Roys in Succession, noting that they are similar families with similar goals in appealing to similar audiences, but they would never mingle at the same parties. It makes a certain kind of sense that chronic sinners are also the biggest believers in redemption. There is no insult or betrayal that would be too wounding to do permanent harm to any relationship within this family. But when May-May comes back to Eli looking for help in the present day, he finds he can’t turn his back on her and even works up the nerve to drive straight into a hostile militia camp to reconnect with his nephews. The first episode of this season opened with a flashback where Eli’s sister May-May clocked his beloved wife Aimee-Leigh in the head with the wrench, which would seem to be cause for permanent estrangement. The Bible offers dozens of verses counseling the faithful to be slow to anger and quick to forgive, and though the Gemstones are chronically terrible at that first part, they don’t hold grudges for long. His father Jesse had an affair on his mom - and got shot through the butt cheek and anus for it - but now they’re selling their reconciliation tips to married Christians at $500 a pop. Perhaps that’s the one benefit of sinning so often: Who are any of these people to cast the first stone? In the first season, Gideon Gemstone returned from Hollywood to run a blackmail (and later, heist) scheme on Eli’s ministry and now serves as his driver. Those values may be obscene and debased much of the time and the family wildly dysfunctional, but among the Gemstones, there are no sins that cannot be forgiven. Yet it is also, at times, a disarmingly sincere show about family values. The Righteous Gemstones is a raucous satire of the unholy union of capitalism and religion, as well as all-American greed, hypocrisy, vulgarity, stupidity, violence, and alpha-male braggadocio. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |