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.

Download The Riches Episodes

Related posts:

  1. The Riches: The Lying King (season finale)