Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO
It would be an insult to the writers and craftspeople behind this episode of The Righteous Gemstones merely to describe the cold open as Baby Billy waterskiing in the nude, a kind of sequel to his casual drawer-dropping after the telethon rehearsal in the season’s second episode. Baby Billy’s first full-frontal scene is more a testament to Walton Goggins’s incredible hayseed bravado in the rule. (“Behold, look at this. That’s my privates right there.”) But the waterskiing bit is cinema because so much forethought has gone into the funniest possible staging of the sequence. Specifically, there was the revelation that Baby Billy dropping to one ski would result in the most intense stream of…
