Family jewels

It's going to be a while before the next season of "Dexter" or "The Shield" get released on DVD, so Mr. Improbable and I, both major fans of Eddie Izzard, decided to check out the newly released comedy-drama "The Riches." We've now seen all but the final episode, and I must say--yowza.

There's a lot about the concept that's fairly derivative--you could describe the show with some accuracy as a cross between "The Sopranos" and "Big Love." Izzard and co-star Minnie Driver are Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, Irish Traveller con artists who get a chance to steal the identity of a recently deceased upper-middle-class couple, Doug and Cherien Rich, and join straight society. So you've got the whole Sopranos-style criminals living in the McMansion in a gated community thing going on; there's even one shot of Wayne picking up the newspaper in his bathrobe--black silk, not white terry, but a clear nod to Tony all the same. And a la "Big Love," family members from the old way of life (fundamentalist Mormon compound/Traveller camp) keep reappearing to threaten our main characters' new, suburban way of life. (Which poses a bit of a logical problem; I've never been in a gated community, but isn't keeping out violent, itinerant con artists rather the point of gates in the first place? Somehow Ducaine, Louisiana doesn't seem quite cutting-edge enough to want Christo gates for pure aesthetic novelty.)

The real brilliance of the show lies in its portrayal of the process of modernization. As Travellers, the Malloys (Wayne, Dahlia, and their three children) lived a tribal, semi-nomadic life circumscribed by tradition, rules, and clear boundaries between their kind and the rest of the world. As grifters, they worked as a team, with the children contributing just as much to the family livelihood as the adults do. They live more like a pack than a family, sharing a single huge RV--few secrets, of sex or money, are kept between the adults and the children.

When they decide to become the Riches, life changes: Wayne is to be the sole breadwinner, having talked his way into a corporate-law job; Dahlia the proper housewife and hostess; and the children are to attend school for the first time in their lives. 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. Suddenly they're not a team anymore, they're a collection of individuals with discrete roles. Suddenly "work" and "home" and "school" are different places. Suddenly the kids aren't junior partners, they're just children, responsible for nothing but their own education and amusement.

The Malloys were criminals, but watching their extraordinarily tight-knit, loving, mutually supportive family unit cope with the strain of their increasingly decentered family life is both heartbreaking and thought-provoking. (Why is "heartbreaking" one word and "thought-provoking" two? Are hearts more naturally broken than thoughts are provoked?) Dahlia, in particular, is a case study of the feminine mystique: she's driven nearly mad by playing housewife, but her depression and rage aren't caused by a feminist need for self-determination or achievement in the outside world. (She hasn't quite grasped that the outside world even exists yet.) Rather, she desperately needs to physically be with Wayne always, to partner and counsel and defend him, to contribute in a concrete way to their family's livelihood, to know that she has valuable skills to pass on to her children. Her misery at playing housewife doesn't come from a need for independence from her family, but from a need for connection to it--she can't, for the life of her, see how it's going to make her closer to her children to pack their lunches every day when she used to be their school. She can't see how lunching with the neighborhood women and wearing pretty dresses (which my oh my she does--I want every single dress Minnie Driver wears) really makes her a wife to Wayne.

"The Riches." Check them out. At one point in the show, Wayne says something to a client along the lines of, "You want what all Americans want--you want more." You watch this show, maybe you'll want more, too. Not more stuff. More connection to those who you consider family, and in more deep and varied ways.