The Righteous Gemstones

yes! the hurricane thing was so stupid & hilarious … and the DANCERS omg

― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, August 3, 2023 9:48 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

excuse me, they’re not dancers, they’re “bonker boys”

i stand corrected lol

this is the bonkers part of the program!!

Could listen to Walton Goggins say “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers” for an awfully long time without getting tired of it

We've been cruising through the current season not least because my wife *loves* this show, but honestly I've been struggling a bit with the relentless assholery of everyone (albeit mitigated by the pervasive puerile weirdness of the whole enterprise). It's kind of just a trashy(er) "Succession," though again, soooooooo weird.

Finished this season. This show is so bizarre I can't believe it's on the air, let alone chugging through multiple seasons. It's like HBO gave a bunch of precocious home schooled 15-year olds and their dads a blank check to just explore their general batshit ideas and crusade for on-screen dick depiction.

so what youre saying is it’s glorious

xp

It's not like this is the first successful Jody Hill/Danny McBride joint on HBO. Clearly it's a thing people like.

It's funny, my wife *hates* his other shows, she just likes this one.

But yes, praise be, this show is somethin'.

Eastbound & Down rules
Haven’t seen Vice Principals

vice principals also rules

and perhaps uncoincidentally contains some very high-level Goggins

Vice Principals is a riot

when you see early Goggins in The Shield you don't much of a sense, or at least I didn't - that he had the potential to be so fucking funny

baby billys bible bonkers

colds, flus, streps...even covids

the people they casted as young Jesse, Judy, and Amber are so insanely spot on it's kind of freaky

also I gotta say I appreciate the way this show makes each season its own separate plotline where there aren't any real cliffhangers during the season finales. as much as I like great longform dramas like Better Call Saul and Succession it is pretty irritating to have to wait 18+ months between seasons by which point you've forgotten a lot of what's happened in the last one

such a weird show all over the place in tone and genre like some weirdo korean movie, but the real attraction is shithead dialog, i prefer eastbound and down cause its totally focused on danny mcbride taking shit but i gotta say edi patterson is on his level, judy gemstone amazing work

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yeah the actor who plays young Jesse is uncannily good at mimicking McBride's delivery (Judy less so, imo, but that's a tall order for a young actor), it's kind of mesmerizing.

I like how the flashbacks show how scripted the show is. The characters seem like they stem from the actors so much, I would have assumed there was a lot of improv.

frogs otm - I feel like there is an actual term for it and I can't remember what it is, but it came up specifically around the early seasons of Sons of Anarchy, where every year there'd be a huge cliffhanger that would set the tone for the following season, but things would always eventually wind up status quo anyway by the end of the season, and lots of prestige shows would do that and it drove me nuts.

I like that Gemstones usually resolves theirs by final episode because the fun of the show is just how bizarre it is, the weird, abrupt tonal shifts between hilarious and serious-as-a-car-crash, the one-liners, the constant sibling rivalry, Goodman's constantly fluctuating accent, etc.

I will say this last season was my least favorite though. I think season 2 was my overall fav

The scene with "All the Gold in California" was really lovely, I keep rewatching it

such a weird show all over the place in tone and genre like some weirdo korean movie

yeah there's definitely something very odd about it - outside of McBride's other shows what it most reminds me of is Arrested Development, both in that it's about a family of spoiled adult children and in how dense and incredible the comedy writing is. like there are jokes all over the place in this show, and they're often all over the frame too - if you rewatch an episode you'll catch a lot of stuff you missed the first time because there's so much there and they don't try to draw your attention to every funny thing the way a lot of bad comedies do. and most of the characters are so inherently funny that you could laugh at nearly any line they say, like there are 30 quotable bits in every single episode, and even the little reaction shots are hilarious. but then suddenly the show will switch into a high-stakes drama, or an action movie with very expensive-looking car chase scenes, or like a Ryan Murphy show where it goes so over-the-top you don't know how to react, and it all comes off strange because it's primarily written like a comedy. There's a lot more attention to detail in the funny bits than there is the plots it seems - I like the plots but they do often telegraph exactly what's going to happen, only to switch it up with a plot twist that would be impossible to see coming, the sort of thing that the dramas it tries to imitate sometimes wouldn't really be able to get away with. but I love the show anyway, if nothing else I appreciate the willingness to make something so bonkers out of what must be a pretty huge budget.

STOP SAYING "PUSSY"!

S3 finale was, by the way, one of the most bonkers episodes of TV I think I've ever seen, it's so crazy that when Peter apparently survives a massive explosion with nothing but a missing leg your only reaction is "well this show is a little fast n' loose with reality sometimes"

he could decided to run away from it at the last minute and just got hit by some shrapnel or whatever