TV is the New Reading

‘The Riches’ is an engaging family drama masquerading as comic farce

Some shows explore a fish-out-of-water situation where people get to experience how the other half lives.

In “The Riches,” Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver learn how the other 99 percent lives.

We meet a family of scam artists who maintain an existence as members of a community of “travelers” — it was as close as the show dared to whisper the word “Gypsies,” although no one in the group seemed to be ethnically Romani, so it’s probably just as well – who seem to get by entirely on grift, con games and outright theft.

It seems like Eddie is outgrowing life constantly on the run. He seems to hold the other travelers in contempt — especially the leadership.

And it’s not an entirely stress-free existence. His wife, Minnie, just got out of prison with an addiction to ... something (cough syrup? heroin?). His younger son is a crossdresser – sometimes for the scams, and sometimes just for fun. And other travelers always want to horn in on his scams. They started chasing his family’s RV down in their RV and ran a car off the road.

A carload of Riches.

The other RV turned tail and ran. And in an instant, Eddie knew what he wanted to do with his life.

He becomes Frank Rich.

You can do this in the wake of vehicular manslaughter, when your wife’s nutty family’s RV antics run a man and his family off the road, killing them. You and your family bear a superficial resemblance to them. You steal his cellphone, his keys and his wallet. Then you strip his vehicle and shove it into a slough. Then you move into his new house and you don’t flinch when the movers arrive with his stuff.

Now you have his entire life.

And you have to deal with living it.

Face it — it’s a huge lifestyle shift from scamming people at their awful class reunions, robbing them blind and making a getaway to committing the ultimate identity theft. Eddie – I mean, Frank – is going to have to know how to do a lot more than play a mean game of golf. His wife’s addiction isn’t going to make life any easier, and his children haven’t ever had to attend classes or do homework in their lives.

These are people who haven’t ever had to maintain anything more longterm than a ruse, trying to figure out mortgages and tax forms.

It’s not delightful, nor is it a thrill-a-minute laugh riot. There’s definitely some goofiness to it, but what it is mostly is a fairly decent family drama masquerading as a comic farce. Sure, with the cast and the storyline you might be expecting comedy in every direction. But the topics they’re raising and the show’s initial treatment of them are so much more “Brothers and Sisters” than “Knights of Prosperity.”

It’s like the writers envisioned an absolutely impossible situation and then tried to figure out how it would play out in reality, and found a pretty good group of actors to explore it.

If the pilot episode is anything to go by, “The Riches” seems like an engaging drama with some capably delivered comic flashes, and is certainly worth a look.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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