The Emmy-Nominated Team Behind The Righteous Gemstones Season Four
Photograph by Jake Giles Netter/HBO
The hit HBO comedy The Righteous Gemstones concluded earlier this year. Created by Danny McBride, the series follows the dysfunctional and world-famous televangelist family, the Gemstones, who run a highly successful megachurch. Season 4 is just as absurd, chaotic, emotional, and hilarious as previous seasons, but also sees the show branch out in an exciting direction with the season premiere. Recently, REVERIE chatted with supervising sound editor Nicholas Renbeck and music editor Michael Brake about season 4 of The Righteous Gemstones.
Renbeck shares what he does as the supervising sound editor on The Righteous Gemstones. “Michael and I work in parallel with each other and touch base every so often. For the most part, though, we're each having our spotting session with Danny and our picture editors, and knowing what we need to go and address. I’m finding out what needs to be covered in terms of what was recorded on set, what we need to add, or what we need to enhance. Then, my team and I move forward and cover everything we can outside of the music. We reference what’s in the picture editing, and some of that has already been provided by Michael along the way, so we have a guide of where we should step forward and where we should step back. The hierarchy of it, I would say, is spoken word, then music, then everything else. In some places, we’re doing the spoken word, and it’s like, ‘OK, are we up front? What do we add to it? Is the music going forward? Is it an emotional thing? How do we support it?’ Then, of course, we come to the music end, and all our final tracks are there together. Michael and I, and the re-recording mixer, Martin Czembor, will do our pass. Then, we will present it to Danny.”
Alternatively, Brake explains what his role as the music editor is on The Righteous Gemstones.“On a show that is as musical as Gemstones, I am working on it long before we get to a spotting session, especially on the big musical numbers, as I have already kind of gone through and edited with the picture editors several times… Strangely, in Gemstones, we do it a little differently. The composer is riding the whole way up, so by the time we get to a spotting session, we are pretty close to done, which is great; that’s very rare in this industry… Every now and then, we have to check in with [Nick’s] team, and they have to send me things from their dialogue sessions, so I make sure I’m not going over it, or I’m sending them things from my music session to kind of help them prep things.”
Brake and Renbeck find that every episode on Season 4 is a winner, especially highlighting episodes one (“Prelude"), two (“You Hurled Me Into the Depths, Into the Very Heart of the Seas”), and nine (“That Man Of God May Be Complete”). Additionally, some highlights of the season for them include the wedding of Kelvin Gemstone (Adam Devine) and Keefe Chambers (Tony Cavalero), Uncle Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) waterskiing nude, and Teenjus (the young adult TV show Uncle Baby Billy makes about Jesus’ teenage years).
Brake and Renbeck are particularly proud of the work they did on “Prelude,” as they were both nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) for this episode. The episode follows Elijah Gemstone (Bradley Cooper), a con man who becomes a preacher, joining the Confederate Army as a chaplain, during the Civil War. “It was an interesting departure and a way to re-look at the show with fresh eyes and a fresh take,” Renbeck says. “As seasons went on, Justin [Bourret], one of the picture editors, would call me earlier and ask for stuff early. Months and months before, he sent me early drafts of the battle scenes so I could start fleshing out what that would sound like. There was definitely a lot of back and forth on that one. I think that one definitely shows in terms of more time spent on the effects world and the background side.”
Renbeck shares that the quiet moments in episode one, especially the moment right before the firing squad, were among the most difficult to get right. “You’d think you just put in a wind tone and go with it, but no, it’s actually like, ‘How many crickets do we actually hear? Where does it build? Where does it fall? When do we see and hear the trees? How much do we have to let in?” It's all extremely subtle and takes a lot longer than you’d think. It’s not resampling things or using the latest plugin. It’s just working with some good basic background tracks, figuring out how they should sit in conjunction [with everything else], and having a nice clean mixed dialogue track.”
On the music side of things, Brake was tasked with figuring out how to sync a significant amount of live music for episode one. “If you’re seeing musicians playing, you do really want to hear something that matches,” Brake states. “We had four songs that were pre-recorded for the campfire scene. Finding that right moment where the guitar is going, the fiddle is going, and finding the moment that actually looks in sync… [There is one moment] when the fiddle player is playing these much longer legato notes, and it's like I’ve got to find a part of the song that has at least some longer notes and not just him sawing away at it… When I first got the marching band, they were like, ‘It doesn’t feel real.’ I got all the stems and started to break out the small little moments, like where the drummer is playing slightly off, and you have to watch frame by frame and see those things and place drums in those certain moments. As you see them coming towards the camera, what are the first instruments you hear? You’ve got to know your sound waves to know that lower instruments come first or some of the bright ones.”
Additionally, the role of musical themes in The Righteous Gemstones, especially during the end credits of episode one, stands out to Brake. “When we get to the end of episode one, we’re using the end credits as a time machine,” he says. “Going back to the ‘Jesus Loves The Gemstones’ big choir theme, which that song goes all the way back to the very first episode, is your fast forward into the modern day Gemstones.”
On the other hand, Brake and Renbeck had lots of fun messing around with the jetpacks in Season 4. “That’s a case where the sounds are not silly, but the actions are silly, so you try and give the best sound that you can to help support that,” Renbeck comments.
“The music is great and driving, but you've got to hear those jetpacks,” Brake says. “There are gonna be times when music needs to lead and times when sound needs to lead, and those are conversations we have in the mix stage.”
Brake loved all the musical moments and songs in season 4; however, the one that stands out the most to him is actually “Redeemer” from Season 3. “DeVoe [Yates, music supervisor] reached out and was like ‘We need to make it more like Charlie Daniels,’” Brake recalls. “[Those] Charlie Daniels-like drums I cut two days before Christmas on my in-laws' dining room table.”
Brake was specifically looking at Daniels' “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” as inspiration. “‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia, ’ the drums are really straightforward, then you have to lay it back a little bit, then really straightforward and then double time here,” he says. “I was taking ‘Redeemer’ and chopping it up and re-chopping it [getting] an entirely new drum performance out of what I got to give it more a Charlie Daniels feeling. Sometimes I was stretching notes out a little… I was able to pull things out and move some fiddles around, but rebuilding the drum track was the biggest thing they needed. It was just straight double time. Everybody thinks ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia’ is fast, but I’m like, ‘No, the drummer is laid back and pocketed.’ All of a sudden, [the new drum track] allowed all the instruments to really shine a little bit more, and when you go double time, you actually can feel that push of energy with the ‘Redeemer.’”
Meanwhile, Rennbeck loved all the sound work on Season 4, especially episodes one and two, but also really enjoyed doing the locust scene at the end of Season 3. “A huge shoutout to the sound effects editor, Rachel Wardell, because she spent so much time coming up with different types of sounds of crickets and bugs that we could make, and just provided me with so much,” he says. “You kind of get lost in it and have fun with it while you’re in there.”
Previously, Brake was the music editor for the Rough House Pictures television series Vice Principals and Eastbound & Down. Righteous Gemstones is a huge leap in musicality. “The upping of the music as a character was a huge jump in storytelling,” Brake says. He highlights that composer and songwriter Joseph Stephens did an unbelievable job of creating very catchy, highly original tunes. “‘Sassy On Sundays’ is in my brain at least once a week… I still can’t believe there is not an Aimee-Leigh Gemstone [Jennifer Nettles] Christmas special at the Grand Ole Opry,” because that would be amazing.”
Although Renbeck did not work on any of the Rough House Pictures shows before, he did work on Succession, another HBO series about a wealthy family. Renbeck shares that sound was approached very differently on each show. “In Succession, they live in New York City so they can afford silence. New York City is a busy place. They can afford silence. The interiors [of their building] are quiet, they have triple-pane glass, and thick walls. In that show, [the sound] is much more reduced. Whereas with the Gemstones in their world, money buys them things that are big, loud, and exciting. We push up those things with the fancy cars, the fancy soda machine, or the sounds of their golf carts. Louder is wealth.”
Despite being sad that The Righteous Gemstones has come to an end, both are happy that the show ended on a high note. “One of the great things that Rough House have always done is they know when the story is over,” Brake states. “When you wonder why there are only two seasons of Vice Principals, it's because the story was done.”
“Danny is going to make something just as amazing and excellent with the next thing he does, and hopefully, he calls, and I get to be part of that world again,” Renbeck smiles.