Now That The Righteous Gemstones Is Over, Walton Goggins & Danny McBride's 9-Year-Old HBO Show Is A Must-Watch

By Sean Morrison

Published May 9, 2025

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Even though Danny McBride's best TV show for a reason, and very few other comedy series offer the same brand of humor as The Righteous Gemstones. Even the first TV show McBride created - Eastbound & Down - feels different from The Righteous Gemstones in several significant ways.

Fortunately, Danny McBride is far from done with creating hilarious TV shows. As he told TV Line, McBride already has new ideas for comedy projects, and his desire to tell new stories was one of the reasons The Righteous Gemstones ended. Those future projects, however, are still a long way off, and McBride's fans likely want another show they can watch while waiting for his next creation. Luckily, McBride and Goggins already created the perfect replacement for The Righteous Gemstones almost a decade ago: Vice Principals.

Vice Principals Is Another Fantastic Danny McBride & Walton Goggins Show To Watch After The Righteous Gemstones

Vice Principals Features McBride's Patented Sense Of Humor & Goggins In Another Boisterous Role

Luckily, there's another Danny McBride show that's perfect for fans of The Righteous Gemstones, and it even features Walton Goggins in another starring role. McBride's 2016 comedy Vice Principals offers the same brand of humor, much of the same cast, and a very similar setting to The Righteous Gemstones. Vice Principals follows two vice principals - Neal Gamby (McBride) and Lee Russell (Goggins) - of a high school in a semi-rural location. The two hate each other, but they conspire to oust the new principal and take her position. Vice Principals' cast even features Edi Patterson, who plays Judy in The Righteous Gemstones, and Jody Hill, who plays Levi.

The best way to illustrate just how similar Vice Principals is to The Righteous Gemstones is through Walton Goggins' characters in each. Lee in Vice Principals is every bit as boisterous, rude, and laugh-out-loud hilarious as Uncle Baby Billy in The Righteous Gemstones. Lee is also just as mean as Baby Billy, and their hilarious insults are only made better by Goggins' eccentric Southern accent. Lee's fights with Gamby also seem extremely reminiscent of the fights between Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin in The Righteous Gemstones. In short, Vice Principals is every bit as sarcastic, rude, and hilarious as The Righteous Gemstones.

Why Vice Principals Was Only 2 Seasons Long

Danny McBride Always Intended For Vice Principals To Only Have 2 Seasons

Even though Vice Principals was a great Danny McBride show, it only ran for two seasons. That's a relatively short-lived series, especially in comparison to McBride's other shows, Eastbound & Down and The Righteous Gemstones, which both ran for four seasons. Fortunately, McBride had a very good reason for ending Vice Principals after just two seasons: he planned the entire story specifically with a two-season run in mind. McBride told Entertainment Weekly as much when Vice Principals season 2 came out in 2017, and he noted that he wanted Vice Principals to be a complete story.

"I think I had been burned by too many TV shows that I invested in, where they started out great, and then, with each season, stuff changed, cast left, and ultimately, at the end of the day, you don't know if you saw the completed thing that the original creators had in mind. So we wanted to create a show that finality to it, that had a beginning, middle, and end, and give people a complete story."

McBride's decision to end Vice Principals after just two seasons makes a lot of sense based on his first show as a creator. Even though HBO wanted to continue Eastbound & Down for more seasons, McBride and the rest of the creators insisted it end with season 4 (via The Hollywood Reporter). In all of his writing projects, McBride has shown a clear understanding of when a show overstays his welcome, and he clearly values the ability to end a series on his own , which is what he did with Vice Principals. That decision made it the perfect replacement for The Righteous Gemstones.