Great TV is often con artistry: a show takes an outlandish premise and gets you to buy it, not so much by making you believe that it’s plausible as by making you want to imagine a world in which it is. That’s the case with The Riches, FX’s mordant con-artist drama, which debuts tonight. It’s far-fetched. It’s outlandish. You will think you are too smart to get suckered in by it, but give it a few minutes and you will be proved wrong.
Wayne and Dahlia Malloy (Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver) and their three children live in a nomadic Irish Traveller encampment in Louisiana and make a living as con artists. (In the bravura opening scene, Wayne and the kids infiltrate a high-school reunion, where the exuberant natural liar Wayne becomes the hit of the party.) Dahlia has just been released from jail, and after some trouble with their neighbors, they swipe the camp’s communal bank ($40,000) and go on the run. On the road, they come across–actually, they help cause–an accident that kills a wealthy couple en route to their new home. Where you might see a tragedy, Wayne sees opportunity: he and the family move into the dead couple’s gated-community home, assuming the identities of Doug and Cherien–yes–Rich. (Yes, I just slammed The Wedding Bells for a similarly corny title. Excellence is its own excuse.)
If The Shield is FX’s Sopranos and Nip/Tuck is its Six Feet Under, then The Riches is its Big Love. Like that polygamy drama, it’s about a subculture you may not have quite believe really still existed in the modern world (here, the Irish Traveller community). But like Big Love, it’s about a bigger American theme: the difficulty of transcending your class background in a country that’s supposedly founded on social mobility.
Wayne and Dahlia have their work cut out because they’re lying, yes, but also because–as they meet the uptight neighbors or try to get their kids into private school–they’re trailer trash trying to navigate the strange customs of the straight world. (Or she is, especially–he was born a “buffer,” or regular citizen, and this is a point of tension between them.) Their specific con is unusual, but their basic situation is the same as any people who have advanced beyond their station of birth: feeling phony, pretending, bumping up against invisible barriers.
Those are the thematic strengths of the show. What makes it good TV is a constantly suspenseful premise, sharp satiric writing (the parallels between the con artists’ BS and the BS of everyday life offer endless material) and, especially, Izzard’s performance as Wayne, which is bound to get him awards hardware. Wayne may be amoral, but it’s a delight to watch him because he seems to enjoy his own work for the challenge of it. He even ups the difficulty by conning his way into a job as a lawyer, a job he knows nothing about, except the most important thing. “A good lawyer makes you believe the truth,” he says, in an awesome second-episode scene involving a game of Russian roulette. “You know what a great lawyer does? He makes you believe the lie.” Driver is captivating as the coarser, hungrier Dahlia; both British actors’ accents are a touch off, but somehow that works in a series about characters who are, after all, chameleons.
As the series goes on, you realize that Wayne is maybe too good at what he does–he may have begun to buy into his straight-life con himself. There are sudden, sometimes violent, reminders that he’s playing a dangerous game, and that he’s staked his family’s lives on it. But it’s to The Riches’ credit that that’s what you focus on: the danger, thrill and criminal exhilaration of their situation, not the ridiculousness of it. The Riches makes you believe the lie.