The Riches TV Show

The Riches is recession-proof entertainment. FX’s drama, entering its second season, actually feels sharper amidst a foundering economy of subprime mortgages, credit crises, and supersize debts. The Riches runs on the fuel of acquisition: It’s all about getting and keeping, and the mental costs of possession. Last season, the Malloy family of Travellers — Irish-American gypsies — slipped into the identity of the late Rich family, taking their mansion, luxury cars, and high-end job as a real estate lawyer for dad Wayne (Eddie Izzard). The new life also includes the constant threat of discovery and never-ending pressure to make more money. This season’s premiere sees the family in crisis in the wake of potential exposure: Wayne tries to deal with everything from drunk bosses to dead bodies while matriarch Dahlia (Minnie Driver) goes on the run with the kids. Whizzing down the highway, she declares, ”We are grifters and drifters and nomads, we’re the scourge of the goddamned earth — we’re Travellers!” Penniless and pursued, she looks more at home than she ever was in the snooty — and ominously named — suburb of Edenfalls, La.

Season 2 wrestles constantly and noisily with the idea of freedom: Is freedom money or the absence of money? Is it a home or rattle-around homelessness? And how does anyone stop craving? ”The minute you get what you think you want, you always want more,” Dahlia frets, and she’s right. Everyone in this drama, rich or poor, is on the make, from Dahlia’s murderous, coyote-eyed cousin Dale (Todd Stashwick), who blackmails the Malloys for a piece of the action, to Wayne’s venal boss, Hugh (Gregg Henry), whose latest real estate venture depends on screwing over Katrina victims. Even the Malloys’ marks have crushing needs. In the midst of stealing a car, Dahlia and her crew get taken hostage by the vehicle’s fed-up owner. At his house, the man paces with a gun as a collection agency rings constantly, his wife grumbles about her Wal-job, and Dahlia tries to figure out what the man needs to feel better. After all his debts and desires are summed up, it turns out he needs about $6,158.87. Hey, everyone has a price. The Malloys eventually decide to risk staying in Edenfalls another few months, until Wayne can cash in on his share of the Katrina land scheme for a tidy $13 million.

The Riches isn’t subtle: It’s filled with symbolic sing-alongs, boisterous speechifying, and a lot of unbelievable story lines, the biggest requiring us to believe that pretender Wayne, in his top legal perch, still hasn’t made a huge foul-up. The drama’s strange coincidences and unlikely twists are boundless. But The Riches is like a skillful shell game: Even when you know you’re being played, the dizzying machinations are irresistible.

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Mr. Improbable and I watched the second season of “The Riches” last week. It’s not out on DVD yet, but you can download it on iTunes. Fourteen bucks for nearly seven hours of high-quality entertainment? Works for me.

I reviewed the first season and analyzed it as the story of a family moving from pre-modernity into modernity: “The Malloys go from a pre-Industrial Revolution cottage-industry way of life straight into the 1950s–it’s like watching a single family experience the changes of the past 200 years in time-lapse photography.”

In the second season, the Malloys discover that before you can even get a handle on modernity, post-modernism is sneaking in the window. Questions of truth and authenticity loom large. In their premodern lives, they were Travellers–con artists–who lived by a clear code distinguishing their own kind from the “buffers” of the outside world. Traditions and morality were clear and understood by all–by all who mattered, anyway. And you were known in the clan. For the buffers, you had a dozen different names, a hundred different games, a thousand cons. It never affected who you were, because buffers don’t matter. In the clan, you were known.

But Wayne and Dahlia left the clan, and took their children with them, into the world of the professional self versus the personal self, the world of Brand You, the world in which there are no buffers, there is diversity training. They knew how to be honest, authentically themselves, in their Traveller life: you lie to the buffers, you tell the truth to your own people, you follow the rules. Now it’s not so clear for them.

Everyone except Sam, the youngest, faces an existential crisis in season two, and you can tell Sam’s is coming. Wayne makes a unilateral decision and, more than that, lies to his own family for the first time–and Dahlia nearly breaks under the strain of maintaining that lie in front of their children. Meanwhile the constant threat of her parole status leads her to try to lead a conventionally honest life–which requires lying to Wayne, and doing some very strategic truth management with her parole officer. Minnie Driver and Ntare Mwine are powerfully good scene partners. Spent and raw and tearful, Dahlia sees in Officer Devereaux what she once saw in Wayne, a man who can be trusted to believe in her, a man who has a plan for her. And Devereaux sees Dahlia’s humanity and desire for honesty, just as clearly as he sees that she’s playing him. He, too, is tired and disillusioned and wants to believe in his work, that maybe there’s an ex-con out there that really can be rehabilitated, whom he can help. Watching them negotiate with each other, with their own fantasies of what the other could be, with their own fears of what they themselves are, is like watching a slow and intricate dance … with razors.

Cael and Didi, meanwhile, are drifting apart. Adults see more shades of grey than teenagers do; Wayne and Dahlia still hope to find a way to live as Travellers in a buffer world. Cael and Didi can only see one or the other way of living, and with typical adolescent self-righteousness reject their parents and head in opposite directions from each other.

When “The Riches” began, the emotional and economic center of the Malloys’ lives was the huge RV they ate and slept and schemed in together. Season 1 ended with them in separate rooms in a McMansion, heading off to school or work during the day. By the end of Season 2, the centripetal forces have accelerated: Wayne sleeps fitfully in the mansion, clutching a pillow where Dahlia’s body used to lie; Didi sleeps with the ultimate corruptible buffer–a teenage security guard–in the Eden Falls houses they break into; Sam sleeps in a tent in the front yard, Cael sleeps in a Traveller camp; and Dahlia works the night shift at a fish shack and paces her parole-ordained apartment in the rough side of town.

Life comes at you too fast, too hard, sometimes, and you get tired and confused and let go of the wrong things.

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