TV Review: ‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Season 3, Episode 4

One of The Righteous Gemstones‘s greatest strengths is also one of its big weaknesses. It has so many characters that are off doing their own wild story lines that it’s often difficult to give each one their own time to shine. Other HBO shows also have wide and expansive casts. Game of Thrones is a great example of this, but Thrones has hour long episodes opposed to Gemstones roughly thirty-minute runtimes. This doesn’t give the show as much time to develop these plot threads. Also, Thrones has entire episodes where characters aren’t seen. The Righteous Gemstones pretty much shows every character in every episode. So things have to move relatively quickly to get it all in.

This week’s installment continued on the same path as last week’s as the various individual story lines progressed. Judy’s (Edi Patterson) husband ends up being stalked by the person she cheated on him with, and he ends up discovering about her infidelity. Kelvin (Adam DeVine) is left with a difficult situation as Keef (Tony Cavalero) causes a scandal within the church. And a lot of the blame for the church’s faltering attendance is put on Jesse’s (Danny McBride) shoulders. He turns to Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) for help, who decides to utilize technology to bring their mom back in the form of a hologram. Lastly, Eli’s (John Goodman) nephews publicly rebuke their father, but they are secretly working with him to steal ammonium nitrate.

In many ways, this was a bridge episode. The story lines needed to progress and so this episode was used as a means to further them along. There weren’t any big action set pieces or huge comedic scenes that previous episodes of the season had. In that regard, the show has a weakness in order to get things moving. But still, the characters and actors are so great that there were still plenty of funny moments within the episode to carry it along. But hopefully next week will have more to chew on.

The Righteous Gemstones air Sundays on HBO.