No Show Does Words Quite Like The Righteous Gemstones
And the English language is better for it
The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…
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Off we go.
FIVE: Blessings
It feels like every episode of The Righteous Gemstones features at least one sentence that has never been uttered by a human mouth before. The show, currently in its fourth and final season, almost has its own language, or at least a dialect. Sometimes it will be as simple as pluralizing words to create funhouse phrases (“doing jetpacks,” “get some night-nights,” etc.), sometimes it’s stringing words together in a way that less-ambitious speakers would never attempt.
It’s mostly the Gemstone children doing this, and among them, it’s mostly Jesse (Danny McBride) and Judy (Edi Patterson). A bunch of Judy’s are so delightfully profane that makes me — a fully grown adult who swears too much — almost a little uncomfortable to even type out. Some are just unhinged little novellas. One time she was telling a story and said, “He did a restraining order on me so I bought him a Jeep Grand Cherokee to prove that I loved him.” There’s more character development in there than most shows can give you in a full flashback episode.
But even there it’s the phrasing. “He did a restraining order on me.” That’s not how most people use words. It’s not how anyone uses words, really, other than the Gemstones. I’ve really been trying to appreciate it more this last season, to soak it all in while I can. Here’s another good example. This is Jesse trying to remember the title of the movie Castaway.
“The Tom-Hanks-by-hisself one.” They say this over and over while trying to get to the actual title. And, like, they’re not wrong. Tom Hanks is by himself a lot in that movie. I just don’t think anyone has ever described the movie that exact way before. I know people will now, though. I for sure know I will. That might be the only way I describe it from now on.
There was another one in the next episode, the one that aired this past Sunday. It came at the end of a full monologue of deranged word collections delivered by Kelvin’s partner, Keefe. It started with Kelvin saying he hated storms because it felt like “the devil is pissing on you.” Keefe then started talking and kept talking and, honestly, I don’t want to type the whole thing out because you really should see and hear it to believe it. It’s not the most graphic monologue that aired on HBO this month, only because Sam Rockwell locked that up on The White Lotus a week earlier, but it really is something. And it ended with this.
This is what I mean. That’s an entirely new sentence. No one has ever said that before. I feel very confident making that proclamation. And it happens almost weekly on this show. It’s a special thing we have going here. And we won’t have it going too much longer. Please do not take it for granted.
