Miss Succession? The Righteous Gemstones is another feuding family TV drama for the ages

Loud, weird and sexually explicit, Danny McBride’s outlandish comedy-drama seems like a far cry from Jesse Armstrong’s Emmy-winning juggernaut. Look behind the style, though, and you’ll find another brilliant TV series with plenty to say about filial conflict, writes Louis Chilton

Danny McBride as Jesse Gemstone in the superlative ‘Righteous Gemstones' (HBO/Sky)

If you ever want a lesson in form vs content, just take a look at The Righteous Gemstones and Succession. At a glance, the two shows – Succession, which came to a momentous end earlier this year, and Gemstones, which was just renewed for a fourth season – could not be more different. Succession was erudite, sophisticated, epoch-making. An awards darling. Gemstones, meanwhile, is crass, puerile, unserious. And snubbed by the major awards bodies. (Gemstones has, however, proved a hit in the US, recently clocking an average of 5.1 million viewers per episode for season two, in the same ballpark as Succession.) Both series, in their own radically different ways, attack the same issues: generational trauma; sibling rivalry; the poison of capitalism. Gemstones is Succession warped in a funhouse mirror.

Instead of the venal, squabbling Roy family, Gemstones follows the venal, squabbling Gemstones – a clan of ultrarich televangelists in the American south. Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) is the stern, inscrutable patriarch; Edi Patterson, Adam DeVine and Danny McBride (who also created the series) play his obnoxious adult children. In many ways, Gemstones is a direct continuation of McBride’s previous work with producer-director Jody Hill, which includes the cult TV favourites Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals.

What elevates Gemstones above its predecessors, though, is its dramatic ambition, and the sheer depth of comic talent onscreen. All the leads are brilliant, taking big, unapologetic swings, while the supporting cast – which includes a spectacularly scene-stealing Walton Goggins as gaudy song-and-dance preacher “Baby Billy” Freeman – are outstanding to a man. (Another quality it shares with Jesse Armstrong’s drama.) Tonally, Gemstones could hardly be further from the florid witticisms and puffed-up business jargon of Succession: its characters speak in brash, sexually explicit outbursts. And yet, look beneath the style, and there is common ground.