Review | What to stream this weekend: HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, starring John Goodman and Danny McBride, back for a third season making fun of megachurches
- The Righteous Gemstones is back on TV to take down televangelism, and season 3 sees John Goodman’s megachurch founder retire and pass the torch to his son
- Meanwhile, stoic hotel group heir Lee Jun-ho and sunny hotel employee Im Yoon-ah clash in Netflix K-drama King the Land – and sparks inevitably fly
Risen for a third satirical series of skewering the hypocritical hell of American televangelism is The Righteous Gemstones (HBO and HBO Go, continuing).
With “America’s Jesus Daddy” and Gemstone Salvation Centre founder Dr Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) now semi-retired and on the book-signing circuit, the blustering, ineffectual new leader of the megachurch is his eldest son, Jesse (series creator Danny McBride).
His fractious rivals for control of the holy money-spinner, in which every service looks and sounds like an arena-sized rock show, are sister Judy (Edi Patterson) and brother Kelvin (Adam DeVine).
The entire family – damned by a rival as “entertainers, performers, charlatans, […] phoney fakers” – continues to live in luxury thanks to donations from the easily swindled.
Celebrating all things reactionary, conservative and capitalist, and accordingly set in the Christian fundamentalist American South, the third season of The Righteous Gemstones takes the lampooning of these profane, violent, self-satisfied, debauched miracle peddlers a step further by having Jesse join a Masonic-style secret sect called The Cape and Pistol Society.
