“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.