'The Righteous Gemstones' Season 3: Danny McBride's megachurch comedy keeps getting better

The return of HBO's The Righteous Gemstones for Season 3 proves one thing: Danny McBride's comedy starring John Goodman, Edi Patterson, Adam Devine, Cassidy Freeman, Tim Baltz, Walton Goggins and McBride himself, is absolutely one of the most divine, electric and perfectly executed shows to grace our screens.

If you've been a fan of the show, Season 3 (premiering on Crave in Canada Sunday, June 18 at 10:00 p.m. ET), absolutely does not disappoint

In fact, everything we loved in the first two seasons is just amplified and elevated. If you aren't watching Righteous Gemstones yet, you're really underestimating this powerhouse cast and the ridiculously compelling storytelling ability of McBride. From Y2K conspiracies to monster trucks and holograms, McBride has outdone himself.

McBride said that one of the most crucial things about Righteous Gemstone is the balancing act between being "completely over the top" and "ridiculous," while remaining "grounded."

“Trying to keep the antics up, but make sure it's not at the expense of the heart, or the emotion of it,” McBride explained. “So it's always finding that line of how far can you push things before you lose the audience.”

What happens in Season 3 of 'The Righteous Gemstones'

In Season 3 of the series, we're still centred around the Gemstone family, but now Eli (Goodman) has retired from his post, leaving the megachurch in the hands of his children, which of course leads to chaos.

Jesse (McBride) still very much wants to lead this Gemstone empire. With the numbers in the Gemstone congregation falling, and their most lucrative benefactor, race car driver Dusty Daniels (Shea Whigham), among those to leave, the Gemstones have to battle a competing family in an attempt to win him and other congregation members over.

While that's happening, Jesse starts to feel like his wife Amber (Freeman) isn't supporting him, too busy with her own project, a kit that has, "everything you need to begin your journey to a happy and healthy marriage in the eyes of the Lord."

“I think it's just adding depth to a character that maybe could be perceived as sort of two dimensional, but it adds depth to her and then adds depth to them as a team too,” Freeman said about where Amber and Jesse are in Season 3. "I think it's really fun that she wants to take on that role and be that sort of mentor for the wives.”

Adam Devine, Tony Cavalero as the 'Smut Busters'

In Season 2 Kelvin (Devine) and Keefe (Tony Cavalero) were running their famed "God Squad" of musclemen for Christ, but now they've moved on to another project: the "Smut Busters." This involves driving around in a van, with children in the youth group, and buying out all the items in sex shops off the highway to shut the "deviants" down.

"No smut. No lust. No coconuts," is the group's slogan.

“[It's] so funny and so wrong to travel in a van full of children to go into porno shops to bust them,” Devine said. “It's inherently very funny and very wrong."

“But then I saw the T-shirts and I'm like, ‘Well, this is gold, isn't it?’ Because it's a Nickelodeon-like splat-style substance, that could also be something else, if you look at it through another lens. So I think ... Danny knows exactly what he's doing. Also, I think he likes to put me in these situations, he gets a real kick out of watching me do this stuff, I think.”

Judy, BJ's 'complex' storyline 'hurt' Edi Patterson

Judy (Patterson) went from the leading lady of the Gemstone megachurch to, in her mind, a full blown rockstar, with Season 3 beginning just as Judy returns from being on the road, on tour with her Christian music. Now home and able to spend more time with her husband BJ (Baltz), Judy has a massive secret that jeopardizes her whole relationship.

Patterson (who's also a writer on the show) said working through these more tumultuous moments between Judy and BJ "hurt."

“It was always exciting to me, them going through this complex stuff, because ultimately that's real, and that's human and complex things happen,” Patterson said. “But it was at first just a little scary.”

“[Like when] you're a kid and you're about to go off the high dive and you're like, ‘Oh God, I climbed up here, and now there's people behind me.’ That kind of sickening feeling, just because Tim, I love him so much, and he's a legitimate homie to me. ... I don't want to hurt him.”

“I definitely had an adjustment to make when I first read it,” Baltz added. “I felt it, like any actor probably would, like it was happening to myself.”

Walton Goggins: Baby Billy is still trying to prove himself

Moving forward from Season 2, Jesse's Zion's Landing resort idea has come to fruition, and the in-house talent is none other than Baby Billy (Goggins). But Baby Billy wants more. He doesn't want to be stuck in the hot resort. Watching a game show on TV, he gets an idea: He's going to travel to the rest of the Gemstone family to convince them to invest in his new game show he'll host, "Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers."

"It’s time for Baby Billy to be back on the motherf-cking TV," he says.

"There's a lot of things that I admire about him, his tenacity, and I love his sense of humour," Goggins said about playing Baby Billy. “He's grown a lot. Last year with his son and coming from this place, he found love. He found acceptance and I think that was a long way for him."

"The thing that I admire most about him is his relationship with [his wife Tiffany, played by Valyn Hall], and his marriage, … and this new kind of lease on life that he has with his family. ... Whether or not life has dealt him a bad hand or if he's been the architect of the bad hand he's been dealt, I don't know, that's up for someone else to decide. But I like the way that he's always thinking, even though it's coming from a narcissistic place, but he always is trying to prove himself.”

John Goodman creates backstories for Eli Gemstone. They 'never turn out to be accurate'

Throughout the series, Righteous Gemstones has done a stellar job of balancing a present day timeline with these interludes that take us back in time. Much of those moments are connected to us slowly learning more about the Gemstone family, but particularly Eli's past and how he became the successful man he is.

In Season 3, that revolves around being introduced to Eli's sister May-May, adding Emmy winner and 3rd Rock from the Sun star Kristen Johnston to the cast.

“Our interludes each season are sort of bringing the audience up to speed," McBride said. "Everyone kind of skips ahead a few years to show us a little bit more and more of how they've grown, and how they've gotten here."

The season begins with a flashback to the 2000s, with a young Jesse hosting a monster truck rally, where we see May-May chase down Eli's late wife Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), seemingly trying to attack her.

Becoming estranged up until this point, with a restraining order in place, Eli and May-May reconnect when she comes to him with a problem. Her husband Peter, played by Steve Zahn, took her two sons to his doomsday preppers, militia, cult-like group, and she needs to get them back. Eli is reluctant at first, but ultimately decides to pay Peter a visit to help his sister.

“Kristen and I have worked together before, we did a play in Central Park,” Goodman said. “So we'd known each other, we worked together well.”

“I like it when stuff like this pops up because I always write backstories for myself and they never turn out to be accurate. With the information that I get from Danny and the writers, I'm always wrong. But it's nice and it's a lot of work. A lot of what Eli does in his life is try to understand people's resentment of him, because of his success. I think that trying to deal with that from other people is enlightening, and ultimately making Eli a better person.”

With McBride's expert storytelling, we learn how May-May's husband got to this place: He, too, was influenced by Eli and Aimee-Leigh pushing Y2K "survival buckets."

"Jesus talked to me last night. Jesus said Eli, you better get them folks ready. Y2K is real. It’s coming and the church is going to need help," Eli says in a flashback where he's promoting this new product.

Of course, the world didn't come to an end when we reached the year 2000, which had ramifications for the Gemstone family.

As we saw in the first two seasons of the show, and we've teased about the upcoming third season, there are so many wacky, absurd elements added each season that really give Righteous Gemstones its unique tone and style.

The Y2K element of the story in Season 3 is something McBride and the other writers of the show knew they wanted to include, but when it comes to things like monster trucks, it's a little less concrete, with McBride describing it as just "weird visions at night" or just having images of things you want to see on the show.

“We write so many versions of these scripts and we explore so many different things, and we throw so many things out, and certain ideas will just stay in the mix,” McBride said. “It is funny to look at the big cork board in our office about all the things we try to get into the show and then what of that remains. They're all just puzzle pieces to us.”

As McBride's co-star Freeman highlights, it's brilliantly surprising how much is packed into each 30 to 40 minute episode of Righteous Gemstones.

“It's so rich and deep, and you wouldn't think that's how long the episodes are, you would think that they're much longer," she said. “There's not a wasted moment."