Season 4 is possibly the best show on TV this year.

One day, and hopefully soon we will look back and fully appreciate the total treasure that has been The righteous gems. Since the premiere of 2019, Danny McBrides’ brilliant, profane, bonkers and ebulliently big-hearted satire of a planning and krangel family of TV-tangelists have been the best comedy on TV, one of the rare works that can channel all pathos and anxiety in its moment and make them something warm, funny, human, human, human. The show’s fourth and final season, starting Sunday at HBO, finds McBride and his ridiculously talented band with partners who go on top and at the top of their games. It’s only March but if The righteous gems‘The Capstone season ends up being the best thing on TV in 2025, it will have been a good year for TV actually.

Season 4 opens with a striking, independent episode that I will spoil anything but to say that it is probably the most ambitious half -time the show has ever made. From there, the new season ends us with the three adult gemstone children, Jesse (played by McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine), who recently inherited the Megachurch family and its affiliated possessions from their retired father, Eli (John Goodman), who recently left a life in mild deterrence in a mild. Jesse tries to market private rental-a-chapels, which he has called “bean bellows”; Judy is still pursuing her singing career while taking care of her husband; The recently out-of-the-closed Kelvin is a leading prism, an alternative Christian worship community. Meanwhile, Jesse’s eldest son, Gideon (Skyler Gisondo), tries, and fails to take the mantle of preaching while his middle son Pontius (Celton Dumont) has been kicked out of the military school. With Eli both figuratively and literally gone fish, both the Gemstone family and the Gemstone family business are increasingly rootless.

The righteous gems Has always been partly a show about grief, a comic portrait of a family fighting in the wake of an unimaginable loss, namely the beloved wife and mother Aimee-Leigh Gemstone. (Aimee-Leigh is often displayed in flashback sequences throughout the show, wonderfully portrayed by the real country singer Jennifer Nettles.) Aimee-Leigh’s death, which took place shortly before the events of the first season, and the hole as it has left in the family is the driving engine behind most of the show’s narrative development. Season 4 finds a widower eli exploring dating again, who prays predictably unhose answers from his three children, all except for their deceased mother.

The righteous gems can boast of so many amazing and one-of-a-kind performances-bare last year, I grew out Edi Patterson’s second worldwide work as Judy, and Tim Baltz and Tony Cavalero’s supporting twists as Gemstone-spheres are the same as Hosanna’s worth. The last season gives a wonderful showcase to another of the show’s biggest creations, namely Walton Goggins’ Baby Billy Freeman, or “Uncle Baby Billy,” which he is known for the Gemstone family. Between his indelible roles in dramas like The shield and Longful and his virtuoso work in comedies as Vice Principals And this oneAt Goggins have a strong case as one of the best TV actors in the 21^st Century, and Baby Billy is a career height. The role is a masterpiece of physical comedy and incomparable line delivery, right down to the frequent punctuation of phrases with “here” and “now” (pronounced “hyuh and” nuh “), or sometimes combined to the declaring” see Hyuh Nuh. “

This season feels like the show’s authors and directors have fully taken the reins of both goggins and Baby Billy, and the result is incredible to see. A funny subplot involves Baby Billy’s increasingly hectic attempt to bring his latest passion project to perform its latest passion project, ”Teenjus“A young-grown TV drama about Jesus as a furious teenager. It is a story that goes in increasingly insisble directions that only works because of how completely engaged goggins are for the performance. His deteriorated transformation competes Steve Little’s performance as Stevie Janowski in McBride’s first HBO series, Eastbound and downAs may be the highest compliment I can imagine a comic actor.

For a show that never sugar coats its core topic, the utilizing intertwining of beliefs, capitalism and media in modern America whose harmful effects in the last half century are difficult to exaggerate-one of the true miracles from The righteous gems is the show’s complete rejection of cynicism. So much of the buzziest TV from the so-called Trump era has tended to swell in people’s horror, from dystopian dramas like The Handmaid’s Tale and Watchmen to the cabinet satires as Succession and The white lotus. I’ve had many of these shows, but it’s hard not to feel that they just make us all feel worse with each other, spoiling our wishes to hear that the kinds of people we’ve always thought were terrible are actually worse than we imagine.