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

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.

Take a scene from Gemstones’ latest episode, “I Will Take You By the Hand and Keep You”, the first of a two-part season finale that aired over the weekend on HBO (and Sky/NOW in the UK). The episode begins in hospital, in the aftermath of a botched ransom kidnapping. (Gemstones loves a scheme gone awry.) Goodman’s character is being chastised by his three children for turning his back on them. The siblings unleash a string of invectives. “You’d make a piss-poor poker player, Muchacho”, Jesse (McBride), poised preposterously on one end of a sofa, tells his father. Then: “Damn ass li’l daddy… I’m so sick of you.”

The language may be cruder, and, frankly, bizarre – no one on earth talks anything like how the Gemstones do – but the emotions on show are sincere. This is a scene of children coming to terms with the inadequacies of their father. A scene of bone-deep filial conflict. One of the standout scenes from Succession’s last season saw Logan (Brian Cox) confront his children in a karaoke booth, telling his progenies: “I love you, but you are not serious people.” The similarities between these two scenes are noticeable; it’s easy to imagine Eli Gemstone responding to his kids the same way.

Of course, it would do Gemstones a disservice to simply view it in apposition with Succession, perhaps the best and most celebrated show of the last decade. While they tackle many of the same themes, their outlooks may be fundamentally opposite. Succession is ultimately a tragedy: the Roy children are cursed by their father’s malignant influence. (“The poison drips through,” in the show’s parlance.) The Gemstones, on the other hand, are quite literally blessed. One of the jokes underpinning the whole series is the suggestion that, despite their selfishness and vanity, their avarice and wrath, the Gemstones are uniquely favoured by God. Everything works out for them, usually by some improbable happenstance that can only be chalked up to divine intervention. (McBride is smart to take this tack, however tongue-in-cheek it may be: it’s a canny departure from the sort of sneering autopilot atheism that pervades religious satires.)

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It’s no surprise that Gemstones has been overlooked when it comes to plaudits. McBride’s sensibility is simply too weird. Plots ricochet between comedy and drama, between petty banter and high farce – with the occasional action set-piece thrown in for good measure. (A stunning motorcycle chase in season two is, for my money, one of the finest action sequences in years.) Fortunately for those of us tuned into its peculiar creative frequency, there seems to be no end in sight: McBride has dispelled suggestions of a Succession-esque four-season curfew. Long may it last.

‘The Righteous Gemstones’ is available to stream now on Sky and NOW