布道家庭第一季

HBO新剧《布道家庭》(The Righteous Gemstones)以美国南方传教士家族为刻画主体，但故事与基督教信仰基本无关，重点在于作为超级教会的创立者、信仰产业的成功者，Gemstones一家人在生活和工作中面临的冲突和挑战。虎父犬子的架构之下，长子、次女、三子的缺陷各不相同，只有一个主要的相似：他们都以赢得老爷子的青睐作为人生前行的主要推动力。置换到中国的背景下，这个剧说的就是一个爱国寺庙如何在几十年内由荒野里的泥土屋发展成为皇宫规模的故事。非信众对大乘小乘、显教密教之间的区别不一定特别感兴趣，真正的故事在于主持们如何不择手段在竞争中取胜以发展壮大佛教事业，高僧们在吃斋的同时还尝点肉、在戒色的同时还从事男女双修等细节当然有助于增加故事的趣味。没有一个老爷子需要众人博取欢心，大家只需要赢得党和政府的支持。

It’s very exciting to hear that you’re working on another HBO series, with The Righteous Gemstones.

McBRIDE: Yeah, we’re really stoked. We just finished shooting the pilot, about two weeks ago, and we turn it into HBO next week, so hopefully they’ll go ahead and kick this sucker into high gear, and then we’ll jump into shooting this thing, at the beginning of next year. We’re stoked about it. I directed the pilot, and then Jody [Hill] and David [Gordon Green] will be back for the rest of the series. It was awesome. We had a killer time. We have a good cast, and we’re really excited about it. I hope HBO is, too.

What led you to want to do this? Have you always been curious about televangelists or was there a specific one that made you want to tell this story?

McBRIDE: I grew up in the South and I went to church, when I was a kid. My mom was in puppet ministry, and I grew up in a pretty religious household. When my parents got divorced, when I was in middle school, we found ourselves dedicating so much of our lives to the church. My mom was a single mom, raising me and my sister, and we went back to the church that we grew up in and found that people had turned their backs on my mom. They didn’t like the idea that she got a divorce, and they weren’t there to help us. I remember that being an early lesson, when I was young. It’s not that the messages I got in church were bad, but the way that some of the people at this church were using it as a way to make themselves better than other people, it put a chip on my shoulder, from an early age, that I’ve carried with me to my adult life. So, I’ve always secretly wanted to tell that story.

Who are the Gemstones then, and how would you say your character fits into the family?

McBRIDE: The Gemstones are basically a family of world famous televangelists. That was really the main piece of this. This isn’t a hit-piece on religion. With all the shows that we do, it’s always about characters, their relationships to their profession, and how they can use their profession to assume a certain level of respect or power that comes with that. If Gamby can think he’s a ruling king because he’s the principal of the school, or Kenny Powers thinks that because he played baseball than he’s better than everyone else around him, that’s what this is, too. This is a family of world famous televangelists and they do missions, all over the world. They bring in 17,000 people, weekly, to their gigantic mega-church. They pull in a ton of money and are far, far removed from their humble beginnings, when they started. Now, the family has suffered a loss. The mother has passed away, so you meet this family at a moment of crisis, where they’re trying to figure out how things got so far off the rails.