Jay Gatsby would invite them to a party. Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s fame would see them as kindred souls. They are the Malloys, the family of con artists at the center of The Riches, a cinematic new series that is wrapping up its first season on the FX cable channel. Tense as a thriller, but plotted with the breathless extravagance of a farce, The Riches is on one level a barbed satire of modern American materialism and ambition. Like Gatsby and Golightly, the Malloys reinvent themselves with thrilling audacity, and their story comments wryly on the American Dream.
If you’ve missed the show to date: The Riches is available on iTunes, and FX has just renewed it for a second season. In other words, there are plenty of opportunities for meeting the Malloys, who are “travelers”-members of a brazen, light-fingered, gypsy-like tribe that lives on the fringes of American society. Clan loyalty exerts a powerful pull on this shady group-but the free-thinking Wayne and Dahlia Malloy (Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver) and their three children, Cael, Di Di, and Sam (Noel Fisher, Shannon Woodward, and Aidan Mitchell), set off in search of a new life. After witnessing a fatal car accident, the Malloys take on the identities of the victims, who had been driving to a new home in a snooty gated community called Edenfalls. The Malloys locate the property and move in.
From an outsider’s perspective, Edenfalls is an enclave of smug, greedy plutocrats. The mansions have enormous pools and closets; the beds have cashmere spreads. Cocktail parties flow with martinis, French champagne, and vodka gimlets served in chilled glasses. “You can tell a lot from the quality of a man’s alcohol,” the obnoxious local business mogul Hugh Panetta (Gregg Henry) informs Wayne.
It’s as if the “traveler” family has wandered into the pages of Martha Stewart Living as reimagined by Donald Trump. The spectacle gains piquancy as the Malloys react to their new environment. Minnie Driver’s Dahlia hovers perpetually between elation and panic. Eddie Izzard-drawing on his background as a stand-up comic known for dressing in drag-infuses Wayne’s lines with a marvelous deadpan sarcasm, always preserving the character’s mysteriousness; you know that Wayne finds his new surroundings both desirable and absurd, but you’re never quite sure how that will influence his behavior.
While emphasizing the fish-out-of-water theme, The Riches argues that the lifestyle of Edenfalls-the lifestyle of the American establishment-is not so far removed from the travelers’ world of criminality and hokum. Wayne completes his Edenfalls identity by getting himself hired as a lawyer-he is not one, but he manages the job deftly enough. The implication is that our culture’s fixation on careerism and advanced degrees is itself a kind of scam. Even high-finance begins to seem just a kind of chicanery when the Malloys hoodwink a wealthy celebrity into investing $500,000 in a phony Panco Petroleum offering. During preparations for this gyp, Dahlia briefly has misgivings, “We’re con men, remember?” she protests to her family. “We do fake investors! We don’t do real investors!” But the operation goes off without a hitch. Fake investors, real investors-in The Riches, there’s not much to choose between.
Against this background of such a compromised society, the Malloys’ loving family dynamic seems downright utopian. Wayne and Dahlia are devoted to one another and determined to make a good life for their children. When there’s bilking to be done, the kids chip in, whether by stealing wallets, acting as decoys, or, in the case of Cael, hacking into computer systems. The family that swindles together, stays together.
Many episodes of The Riches emphasize the core identity that the Malloys share, in contrast to the stuffed-shirt suburbia around them. “We got history; we got culture, community,” Dahlia reminds her kids, “whether we’re with travelers or not.” At the same time, she doesn’t want an us-versus-them mentality to govern their existence. When Wayne recommends shunning an impoverished acquaintance whom Dahlia met in prison, she remonstrates. “There’s a big ol’ wall around Edenfalls,” she tells her husband. “You want to build one round our house? What’s next? Maybe you want to build one round our minds?... We live here, but that doesn’t change the fact that in our souls we are different.”
The family, in short, is trying to be in the Edenfalls world but not of it, and that means not buying into the community’s arrogant insularity, sense of entitlement, and dependence on possessions. It’s a tricky balancing act, and one that feeds the narrative’s suspense as fully as the more objective question of whether the Malloys will be arrested for fraud. When it comes to moral currency, The Riches is flush.
