{"id":154500,"date":"2025-08-18T01:27:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T01:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/154500\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T01:27:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T01:27:09","slug":"the-righteous-gemstones-artisans-on-final-season-bradley-cooper-episode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/154500\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Artisans on Final Season, Bradley Cooper Episode"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe dynasty atop HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Righteous Gemstones<\/a>\u201d spent four seasons disseminating a breathless reign of debaucherous, selfish and hysterically ungodly behavior from the pulpit of their South Carolina megachurch.<\/p>\n

\n\tEvery time it seemed like Jesse (co-creator Danny McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine) had plumbed the depths of their moral caverns, they managed to dig deeper in their childlike pursuit of fame and fortune \u00ad\u00ad\u2014 all for God, of course. Yet, this critical darling only managed to earn four Emmy nominations for its first three seasons. Mercifully, its final season changed that trajectory with six below-the-line nominations: cinematography, music supervision, sound editing, stunt coordination, contemporary costumes and period makeup.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile it never broke into the top categories, the strong showing for Season 4 proves the Television Academy has been paying attention to the wild swings the series took, specifically its Civil War-set Season 4 premiere. Telling the story of the Gemstones\u2019 crooked ancestor Elijah (Bradley Cooper), the thrice-nominated episode is a complete departure from everything that came before and after it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was always the monster episode,\u201d says Emmy-nominated cinematographer Paul Daley. To create the righteous battlefield of Elijah\u2019s awakening, Daley leaned on the classics, including John Ford Westerns and epics like \u201cGlory.\u201d He even put the film through a bleach bypass to give it the look of days gone by with more highlights, lowlights and contrast.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tBut no matter what Daley did in or out of the camera, it was the South Carolina summer conditions \u2014 and immaculate production design \u2014 that made it feel real. \u201cWe\u2019re on that set, in that campsite, for days. You\u2019re traveling through the woods, rainstorms, 100-degree days, 95% humidity. You\u2019re in it, so it really wasn\u2019t a hard sell to feel in that environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tConversely, both costume designer Christina Flannery and music supervisor DeVoe Yates earned nods for the second episode, which hard cuts back to the Gemstones as they reap the benefits of Elijah\u2019s decisions 160 years later. In the episode, they stage an annual telethon in honor of their late mother\u2019s birthday, bringing the entire family back together.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe music, including an incredibly chaotic number that bookends the episode with the main trio taking flight in jetpacks, had to be written and choreographed to the second. For Yates, the episode\u2019s music is some of the show\u2019s best, but also the most jarringly Gemstone.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think part of it was just that you\u2019re thrown back in the chaos,\u201d he says. \u201cYou see everybody all at once again. Everybody you\u2019ve loved is there and they\u2019re all doing this crazy, giant musical number. It\u2019s scripted in terms of how things start to go haywire, and the songs build towards those moments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s all perfectly attuned to the chaos of the Gemstones, right down to the clothes they wear for this swan song. In the musical number, the siblings don elaborate angel wings that are too boastful to be holy. Flannery says they had to be shipped in from Ukraine and almost didn\u2019t arrive in time. But bigger and dangerously unpredictable has always been the motto for the Gemstones, even in a moment of family crisis. When the siblings go to retrieve their father (John Goodman) from a self-imposed exile on a fishing boat in Florida, their choice of marine attire carries with it a very intentional visual reference.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe uniforms that Scientologists wear in Sea Org, that\u2019s what I was referencing,\u201d Flannery says. \u201cJudy kind of looks a little bit like Olive Oyl. Jesse still somehow looks like Elvis and Kelvin\u2019s wearing a cape, so he still has that kind of feminine aspect and over-the-top theatrical moment. It\u2019s just about going for it because it is so stupid and so funny, and it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The dynasty atop HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Righteous Gemstones\u201d spent four seasons disseminating a breathless reign of debaucherous, selfish and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":154501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[171,37745,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-154500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-the-righteous-gemstones","10":"tag-tv","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115047172975455780","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}