I’ll address the elephant in the room first: yes, I was super late to watching this.
The Righteous Gemstones is a satirical HBO series from actor and creator Danny McBride, who was also the mind behind Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals. I finally watched Eastbound a couple years back, gracing myself with Kenny Powers’ presence at long last, while I actually got in on the ground floor of Vice Principals when it first aired. That was in the middle of my time in college, in 2017-18, and I’ve recommended it to everyone I know ever since.
I wanted to write about it because it’s a fantastic show and, despite NASCAR playing a very small part of Season 3, it’s notable because we get an ARCA Menards Series car on track at Darlington Raceway and a little bit of racing action in the season premiere. Ironically, in reality, ARCA has never raced at the Lady in Black.
McBride also drove the pace car at the 2023 Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, followed by cast member Adam DeVine (also of Pitch Perfect fame) serving as Grand Marshal to give the command at Sonoma Raceway that summer.
All three of McBride’s comedy series are extremely funny and extremely profane, featuring what I like to call McBride and crew’s knack for writing scripts with sentences nobody has ever said before or ever will again. This includes one of my favorites: “They’re just some fellas I do car pranks with.” It has no reason to be as funny as it is, but in the context of the show it’s fantastic.
All of this is to say that I finally got around to Gemstones late last year, got out of the habit of watching it and then picked it back up just after 2026 began. It’s just as funny as the other two shows, running for four seasons and concluding with the most recent in 2025.
The short premise is that the Gemstones are a dysfunctional family of televangelists who are terrible to each other and the people around them, but — in traditional McBride fashion — it’s written to balance the comedy with truly heartfelt moments.
It stars McBride, Edi Patterson and DeVine as the three Gemstones siblings, along with John Goodman as their father. Walton Goggins — of The Hateful Eight, The White Lotus and Fallout — plays Goodman’s brother-in-law Baby Billy Freeman, and the host of guest stars ranges from Sturgill Simpson and Bradley Cooper to Eric Roberts and Steve Zahn. Michael Rooker, Rowdy Burns himself, even shows up in a central Season 4 role.
Season 3 came out in 2023 and is bookended by a NASCAR plot, which I somehow didn’t know until I actually watched it. Driver Dusty Daniels effectively makes the Gemstones compete with another church family for his endorsement, and though the storyline is kind of dropped until the end of the season, it kick-starts the rivalry between the Gemstones and the Simkins throughout.
Daniels (played by the great Shea Whigham, also of F1, Vice Principals, True Detective and a million other things) is doing some test laps around Darlington in a No. 55 car (it’s never specified what series, but it’s ARCA bodies on pit road) when we meet him. He’s got a few other machines lined up — unsponsored, Hardee’s (the same scheme as Russ Wheeler in Days of Thunder) and Valvoline, but the one he’s driving is a red-and-white Winston car.
I do love that they took the same vector design that Winston used for No Bull and rebranded it with Daniels’ catchphrase in the show, “Whoo-Weee, Sucker!”
The cars all have contingencies and everything, and Whigham has some pretty great old-age makeup on to go with his fully-emblazoned firesuit that has Prestone, Winston, Champion, Ford and We Care patches to boot. He’s also got a Winston Cup Series patch.
Edi Patterson (Judy Gemstone) is even wearing a racetrack necklace, lined with diamond studs and three 1:64 diecasts (Jeff Gordon, Terry Labonte and a generic yellow Chevy car). McBride (Jesse Gemstone) has a classic NASCAR Winston jacket on. Adam DeVine (Kelvin Gemstone) is rocking a hoodie with Daniels’ car on it and a bandana.
Vance Simkins, played by Stephen Dorff, shows up as the Gemstones’ competitor. To win back Dusty’s endorsement, Vance (who’s “dabbled in Formula 1”) and Jesse hop in two of the cars (Vance in the Valvoline, Jesse in the Hardee’s) to race it out.
Jesse’s car fails to start and, once it does, we get a good long shot of Whigham watching as the No. 55 smashes into the Turn 1 wall. Not sure how much of it was CGI, but it looks pretty good.
Slight spoilers below:
At the end of the season, episode 9 features the great Walton Goggins finally launching his game show “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers,” with the Gemstones and Simkins facing off once again for Dusty’s endorsement.
Dusty passes away, but in arguably the funniest moment of the season, his No. 55 car descends from the top of the screen as John Goodman delivers the eulogy; he’s buried sitting in his stock car in a stock-car-sized grave.
Just fantastic stuff. Cannot wait to see what McBride and company work on next.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.