I really underestimated Danny McBride. His and Jody Hill's work is great.

Her Outback Steakhouse monologue in Righteous Gemstones might be one of the few times I legit cried laughing at a scene. Also, I gotta give a lot of props to the actress who played a child version of her because she was very accurate in nailing Edi's mannerisms

Don’t shake his hand, he’s big dickin you.

Always Sunny is great and Kaitlin Olson is really good in it, but Edi is on another level as Judy Gemstone in my eyes. Her monologue at Outback to end the first season is one of the best, funniest things I've ever seen. And her unhinged (i.e. incestuous) confrontation of BJ's sister in the bathroom isn't that far behind.

Well she's not a bird, so.. 😜

My husband and I still do that.

Its my partner's go-to stim pretty often.

I'm not saying that Boyd was a comedic role in a comedy. I'm saying this could be the place where McBride saw Goggins's comedic chops. Also, it's a show worth seeing, as you are well aware.

I ain't askin' for the world here! All I'm askin' for is an eight ball and two million dollars!

I got your miracle right here, nerd.

Doesn't even make sense. Should be Teensus.

Cocaine!

Agreed. They made it a show that probably won't seem that dated to new viewers in a couple of decades. Not all shows are watchable for long after they end.

I mean, I don't think they were going for realism in Gemstones at least 99% of the time. My issue mainly stems from feeling like there's a disconnect between the show trying to highlight the evils rooted in the family history, versus the show seemingly wanting you to root for the Gemstones by the end of every season. This feels like a rather absurd comparison, but a lot of endings in The Wire come across as saying "scummy people in real life don't often get their comeuppance, and that sucks and you should be angry/depressed about it" whereas in Gemstones it more often feels like "scummy people in real life don't often get their comeuppance, but who cares? Isn't it great that everything worked out for them in the end?" And while you could argue the same thing applies to Eastbound to some degree, the baseline level of dramatic tension/emotional heft was far lower in an average Eastbound episode.

> Ultimately, I agree that Neal Gamby is the easiest character to sympathise with. His motivations are the purest of the three characters. Funny enough I didn't actually intend to say this in my initial comment, but you are 100% correct here in that he's the most sympathetic of the three, both because of his purer motivations, as you note, and because he's the only one that doesn't come from a place of extreme privilege. And while you'd *think* that this sorta conflicts with my take that VP's stronger condemnation of its protagonists puts it atop both Eastbound and Gemstones, if anything I think the two combined just show how well-rounded the characterizations in VP were. I still need to watch Foot Fist Way but from what I've heard he may be even more pathetic (and resultantly more sympathetic) than Gamby. > I also think Gideon is meant to show that not all is lost. He is grounded and gives the impression of seeking the right path, rather than just going for whatever nets him a profit. Yeah if anything I think the side characters were the best part of Gemstones. You could probably make an argument for this with all three of these shows, but I think it's less obvious in VP and Eastbound because they're way less ensemble-focused (although Stevie is still hands down the best character within anything Hill/McBride, and one of the all-time greatest characters across the entire history of television).

Every time I watch this movie i think of what could have been, had Danny McBride had been the lead. I think the only way the movie got made was the studio attaching a bigger star at the time like Seth Rogen as the lead. I still love that movie, but agree Danny would've been great in that role as well

I think the disconnect here is that I don't see Rogen (and Goldberg)'s style as being all that similar to Hill/McBride, beyond a shared tendency towards crassness and a shared tendency towards idiotic male protagonists getting with women that are way too hot and/or well-adjusted for them. I think there's a MASSIVE difference in how their works tend to come across tonally, with Hill/McBride stuff being a lot darker, more aggressive and more confrontational in style. Springing to mind immediately: Rogen has apologized for jokes in his earlier films that have now been deemed homophobic, but none of those jokes feel as mean-spirited or in-your-face as Kenny Powers calling other characters the F-slur or telling his nephews how he and their dad used to beat up disabled kids who lived down the street from them. Also, compared to the archetypal Rogen character, the archetypal McBride character is generally much more audience-alienating in both demeanor and behavior, and is far less likely to "turn a corner" or "learn his lesson" by the end of the story (and I'd argue that whenever McBride does try to end a character's story like this, it falls WAY flatter than any of Rogen's attempts at the same type of ending). I went and looked through Rogen's filmography on Wikipedia to see if my memory failed me, but if I'm only considering the stuff where he plays one of the leads then I stand by my original statement. I *should* have noted that I haven't seen a lot of his more acclaimed work both as a director and as an actor (The Disaster Artist, This Is The End, Steve Jobs, hell I'll even throw in Freaks and Geeks), any of which may cause my opinion to shift should I watch them some day. But out of the movies he had a major hand in creating that I HAVE watched, the only one that still holds up for me today is Superbad. The others I've watched range from "I liked it when I was a teenager but like it a LOT less now" (Pineapple Express, Knocked Up) to "mid at the time, mid today" (Green Hornet, Sausage Party*) to "actually one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever seen" (The Interview, Neighbors 2). I think making this stand out is how prolific he's been over the last couple of decades, which you noted. Hill and McBride do have a fair amount of clunkers themselves once you go beyond their HBO stuff, and they don't release even half as much content as Rogen does. Further exacerbating my perception is how f****** *good* Rogen is in Observe and Report. It's the same effect I get watching Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems - if you're capable of **this**, why are you churning out schlock? * Wanted to note separately: although I cannot in good faith call Sausage Party a good movie, I actually think it was/is *overhated* and that it could've been a GREAT movie if you just took out about 30 minutes of unfunny garbage that added nothing to the surprisingly strong narrative and replaced it with... I don't know, just something better than "haha, they're food and they're having SEX!" Truly jarring experience that one was in theaters, with my reaction constantly whiplashing between being impressed at how dark the plot was and groaning at all the infantile attempts at blue humor that *really* didn't seem to mesh with the main story.