The Righteous Gemstones Recap: Wasting Away in Margaritaville
There’s no better song choice to close this emotionally turbulent and spectacularly vulgar episode than Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin,” a synth-pop classic from 1987 that at once serves the disco-era grotesquerie of the Aimee-Leigh Give-A-Thon inside the Gemstone megachurch and underlines Eli Gemstone’s late-life urge to sow his wild oats. Though Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant had not yet come out of the closet in 1987, “It’s a Sin” references the shame-based repression of his Catholic-school education: “For everything I long to do / No matter when or where or who / Has one thing in common, too.” Then comes the chorus.
It’s funny to think about any kind of repression being an issue in the Gemstone family, which generally allows itself to indulge in the sins (and the language) it condemns on Sundays, but when considering the idea of their father taking up with another woman, Jesse, Kelvin, and Judy are as grossed out as they would have been as schoolchildren. “Could you even imagine if Daddy met someone new?” says Kelvin. “Yucky ducks!” Even though the children find plenty of evidence that their dad has been drinking and carousing on a boat in the Florida Keys, the thought of Eli taking up with someone other than their dead mother is so impossible that they accept his explanation that he uses a bra to catch fish. “All your dick juices are gone,” says Judy, “’cause Mama’s got ’em in a jar up in heaven.”
Eli is indeed wasting away in Margaritaville, doing his own variation on the South Florida cliché of a divorced or widowed gray-hair tomcatting around the marina. However, as difficult as it may be to call a show as bluntly comedic as The Righteous Gemstones “nuanced,” the way Eli handles his one-night stand the morning after sets him apart. For one, it’s not really a one-night stand: The two have been seeing each other for long enough for his lover to want something more from their relationship, suggesting that Eli needed a few dates to justify the sin most men in his situation would commit after a single boozy night at the cantina. He’s even enough of a gentleman to break it off with her gently, frying up a couple of sunny-side-up eggs to see her off in the morning. It’s a torment for him to admit he doesn’t like her. (Credit John Goodman for stretching his jaw a bit at the line, “We 69’d for 40 minutes straight!”)
The Gemstone kids pick up on the obvious signs their father has turned into a seafaring layabout — the long hair, the quarter-filled tequila bottle, the general unkempt bachelor quality of the boat — but they can’t begin to perceive what Eli is going through, much less understand him as a man still capable of love and sex. They just need him to come back for the telethon for their mom, because the church needs as many revenue streams open as possible without him around. The fact that they’re even producing this splashy telethon around their dead mother is a sign that the Gemstone business still has to lean heavily on its past because Eli’s unholy trinity of failchildren are having trouble holding the congregation on their own.
Not that they aren’t trying, mind. Kelvin and Keefe are thrilled by the early returns for Prism, an effort to broaden Kelvin’s hip youth pastor schtick into a more inclusive place for Christians. Keefe presses for Kelvin to make their relationship more public and even suggests getting married, but Kelvin wants to dance a two-step where everyone probably knows about their relationship but they aren’t up front about it. He likens their partnership to Siegfried and Roy in that audiences knew “they were licking each other’s wieners” but wouldn’t stick around for the white tigers if they made it explicit.
For his part, Jesse and his family are out hawking high-tech worship kiosks called Prayer Pods for people who want a space at the mall or the airport to access Gemstone sermons and hymns (and episodes of Bible Bonkers) at times of spiritual need, like when they’re waiting for their wives to finish shopping. The pods look like a cross between a modern airport work booth and the teleportation device in The Fly, but it’s currently seeming more like a containment unit for Jesse’s son’s farts. The prominent credit-card swiper offers 15 minutes for the high price of $15, and the show follows up on the Gemstones’ mercenary shamelessness later when someone working the telethon phone bank asks for a donor’s routing number.
Eli’s return to the church for the event — prompted mainly by his grown children egging him with the word “pussy” — brings an authentic feeling to the whole shameless affair. It also brings a visitor in Lori Milsap, Aimee’s best friend, played by Megan Mullally, an actress whose brassiness on comedies like Party Down and Parks and Recreation fits in perfectly here. Having discounted their father’s libido earlier, the kids don’t notice that Eli and Lori have a connection, and their old man still has enough game to follow through on it. That’s one of the standout pieces of this episode: Eli has a gentle charisma his children lack, which serves him onstage and backstage. (Lori hearing Eli say, “Time surely has been kind to you” in that lacquered Goodman voice seems to get her at the knees.)
The episode ends with the Pet Shop Boys song playing as it juxtaposes two transcendent moments: Eli and Lori’s first kiss, and Jesse Gemstone ascending to the rafters with his jet-pack. Who’s the real sinner here?
Uncut Gemstones
• Between this show and The White Lotus, HBO was already giving you all the Walton Goggins you could handle, but this episode gives you that much more. As lowbrow laughs go, there’s nothing funnier than full-frontal male nudity, and there’s certainly no funnier moment than Baby Billy dropping his drawers in front of the Gemstones in the dressing room after their rehearsal goes awry. “Behold, look at this. That’s my privates right there.” Indeed so.
• The Judy Gemstone filth level remains amplified. After witnessing the spectacle of BJ doing a core-strength workout on the stripper pole, she unleashes her carnal desires: “Watching you work that pole’s got me slick, boy. ’Bout to start finger dancin’ on my snapdragz. Talkin’ bout my clitty cat.”
• The Kelvin Gemstone Bible: “Let’s get rid of that yucky stuff and focus on the good stuff.”
• Jesse’s resentment over his father becoming a mentor figure for Gideon comes out in typically childlike form: “Go be butt buddies with your granddaddy. See if I care.”
• The wardrobe choices on the show are always a treat, but let’s give a special mention to the red velvet tracksuit that Jesse wears to his jet-pack lesson. It really bunches up nicely in the harness.
• “I’m Tyler Perry and you ain’t. You’re more like Luke Perry: dead.” Woof. That’s a tough line.