Misunderstood humor of Danny McBride

“The Righteous Gemstones,” which premieres Sunday, is the third HBO series created or co-created by and starring Danny McBride. It’s not every comic actor who can make that claim. Indeed, if you exclude Chris Lilley’s single-season Australian imports, which most readers will not be able to name, there is only Danny McBride.

Focusing on a family of Carolina televangelists, “Gemstones” follows “Eastbound & Down” (2009-13), which tracked the fall and rise (and fall and rise) of former major league baseball pitcher Kenny Powers, and “Vice Principals” (2016-17), in which McBride’s Neal Gamby schemes to become a high school principal. It completes what McBride has described as a “misunderstood angry man trilogy,” though I would argue that if anyone misunderstands Kenny Powers, Neil Gamby and Jesse Gemstone, it is Kenny, Neil and Jesse.

All are set in the South — and McBride, a Georgia-born Virginian, ramps up the accents for cornpone comic effect. All revel in and repudiate a certain confused masculinity. Fatherhood, complicated by separation, is an issue in all three series. (McBride’s own parents divorced when he was in the sixth grade.) Kenny Powers gets a family, loses and regains it; Neil Gamby, divorced, is desperate to connect with his daughter; Jesse Gemstone has forbidden any mention of his oldest son (Skyler Gisondo), who left the family to pursue a career as a Hollywood stuntman.

I never regret the time spent watching these shows. They’re tightly plotted in a way that draws you from one episode to the next, and fine performances, from players well and less well known, strike individual notes that keep characters free from cliche. I don’t think they’re funny, exactly, though every so often a bit of slapstick or a throwaway aside will make me laugh out loud. But it’s not so much because the jokes are bad — though they sometimes are — as that laughter doesn’t seem to be quite the appropriate response to all the pain and humiliation.

The series do achieve something like depth over the long run, and if it’s only a matter of the characters becoming familiar, that also makes them more recognizably human — more understandable, more forgivable. There is a carefully placed hole at the center of many McBride characters — not just the ones he plays but most of the ones he writes — that only love can fill. As a writer, he’s a sentimentalist at heart, which is what makes his comedies, for all their low humor and violence, basically old-fashioned. They’re feel-good, quasi-black comedies in which the good feeling is delayed as long as possible — but it comes.

McBride, 42, made his first mark in show business in 2008 with memorable supporting roles in “Tropic Thunder,” as an enthusiastic explosives expert, and “Pineapple Express,” as a drug dealer baking a birthday cake for his late cat. Versatile yet recognizably himself, he might have been a contract character actor in the olden days, some director’s William Demarest — Ridley Scott made him the pilot in his 2017 “Alien: Covenant” — though he set out to be a filmmaker, not an actor. Jody Hill and “Pineapple Express” director David Gordon Green, college cohorts from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, remain his creative and business partners. Green and McBride co-wrote the recent “Halloween” reboot, which Green directed; Hill co-created McBride’s first two HBO series.