And that’s how he runs his operation, too.” So we always had an idea that Eli in his past was kind of a gangster. And Aimee Leigh came from an area where she was a child star, and she had things that Eli didn’t, and it was the union of those two backgrounds that created this world. Didn’t have a lot of resources and had to do what he had to do to get by. “I feel like the union of Aimee Leigh and Eli, Eli comes from kind of a more rough and tumble background. “It was always a concept that I had flirted with that I thought was part of story,” he tells Paste. When asked about the wrestling connection, McBride acknowledges that it was something he wanted to touch on before the show even started. And although crime and wrestling are two more things that are in no way unique to the South, they both have a particular history and influence in the region that aren’t quite the same as any other part of the country. Before finding his crooked way to the church, Eli was a prelim pro wrestler in Memphis and a thug and enforcer for the local outpost of the Dixie Mafia. The twentysomething Eli of the late ‘60s might’ve been a Christian, but he wasn’t yet a Man of God, even one as dubious as he would eventually become. In season 2’s premiere episode, we get our first extended glimpse at the early life of Eli Gemstone, the family patriarch who established the Gemstones’ Evangelical empire. That was clear from the start of the first season, but season 2 quickly expands its Bible Belt purview by focusing on two parts of Southern culture that should be entirely separate from the church but run sort of parallel to televangelism. In a career defined by the South, The Righteous Gemstones is the most Southern thing McBride has done yet. And even though megachurches can be found throughout the country, they’re most deeply entrenched in the South, along with the current evangelical culture surrounding them. Washed-up ballplayers can live anywhere, and overly ambitious middle school administrators are striving in every town in America, but the world of televangelism is uniquely Southern. You can see it in Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, but that Southern backdrop is most crucial to their current show, The Righteous Gemstones, whose second season has just started on HBO. Not the cartoon so many people reduce it to, or the near-mystic oddity found in works inspired by classic Southern lit, but the real South, the mundane, everyday, unspectacular but still special place that McBride and Hill both grew up in. Danny McBride and Jody Hill’s HBO shows have ultimately always been about one thing: the South.
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