Idk if media rants are allowed on here but didn’t know where else to post.
For context righteous gemstones is a comedy about the children of a mega church pastor who try to succeed him and lead the church despite there horrible personalities. Generally makes fun of the hypocrisy of these rich church pastors pretty well.
The first episode of the newest season is a flashback to the civil war and the origins of the family. It opens with the ancestor of the gemstones shooting a southern pastor preaching about “states rights” after the service. At first I thought this would be great, this guys gonna go around killing confederates like django. Sadly no he just did it to rob the pastor then goes on to impersonate him as a pastor for the confederates on the Frontline. The rest of the show centers on him being a horrible pastor and focuses on how bad this con man is compared to the soldiers. It then ends with the union capturing his unit and committing a war crime by executing all of them except him.
The depiction of the civil war is completely white washed and focuses on making the confederate soldiers sympathetic children suffering and dying for there country. Slavery is never mentioned, there are no slaves or black people shown, none of the confederates even say anything racist.
I understand that portraying all the confederates as ultra racists with every other word out of there mouth being the n word would be inaccurate. It would’ve been funnier if they did and then we watched them get mowed down by the union, but for some reason this episode they tried to be serious. If you are going to be serious and pretend like this is an accurate portrayal then whitewashing them is just as bad as painting them as evil racists. I get there trying to humanize people often cast as the bad guys but removing there flaws isn’t humanizing, it’s veneration.
The rest of the season seems to be fine and pretty unrelated, so if you do want to watch it go ahead and skip the first episode, wont miss much unless you want to learn about the lost cause myth and how a lot of southerners still view the war.
It’s a comedy, they are trying to make you laugh.
Save your righteous indignation for something that matters.
My dad’s side of the family all fought for or supported the confederacy; they’re all evil racists. There’s nothing special about the US south that prevented them from knowing what they were doing was immoral, if others could figure it out, they could have too, but that was too inconvenient so they just decided to keep being evil racists. There’s no reason to play apologist for any aspect of the confederacy or those in it or supporting it
I think for a comedy it was fine, I don’t think they were trying to do commentary on the Civil War so much as an origin story for the exploitation the family is involved with and has been since the days of The Civil War.
It shows how the original Elijah came to understand how he could manipulate people with religion, when he calmed men that were about to be executed with prayer.
If it was a serious show I’d agree but it’s satire.
if it was a serious show I’d agree but it’s satire
I agree, righteous gemstones generally whitewashes the southern church and rarely shows the racism and homophobia that would be present. But I give it a pass because it’s funny, this episode wasn’t funny. The only joke of the show was him giving a bad sermon to those troops, the rest was just sad imagery of confederate boys dying. This episode was them trying to be serious and it didn’t work IMO.
Satire doesn’t have to be “funny”. I think you’re running into the rigidity of your expectations.
So you didn’t get it. That’s fine. It’s a satire of southern megachurches, and how they are continuing the same con and the confederacy.
I get the focus is supposed to be on Elijah and how bad he is but the background is the lost cause myth and sympathizing with the common confederate troops. I guess you could say they didn’t want to make the confederates look bad so Elijah could look horrible in comparison, but you could’ve had Elijah just be even more racist then the troops.
Like the only sort of funny part where he gives the sermon, if it were realistic he would’ve gone full race baiting and go one about how the unions gonna come and free the n*****s and slavery is in the Bible etc. to rile up the troops. But in this mythical confederacy racism and slavery don’t exist which is ahistorical.
I thought similarly to you; until they showed that the northern army returned the Bible and let him live. In that moment, I think they really showed that the Union was far more respectable. The confederates were dumb hicks fighting at the behest of the ultra wealthy plantation owners
They gave it back after doing a war crime and executing prisoners of war. They also executed them with a fucking gattling gun which is just cruel. I think they were trying to get you to sympathize with the confederates about to die instead of the northerners who were killing an already defeated foe.