Abundance of The Riches?

So, I'm watching TV last night when suddenly onscreen, to the shock of all those around her, a woman's prosthetic limb falls off and hits the ground. No, it wasn't Heather Mills on Dancing With the Stars. I wouldn't watch Dancing With the Stars if Pacman Jones made it rain in my family room. If I want to hate myself for watching amateurs of middling artistic talent prostrate themselves, I'll watch American Idol (tonight at 8:00 Eastern on FOX). No, this was a show called The Riches on the F/X Network, starring Minnie Driver and yet another rakish Brit, Eddie Izzard, as the parents in a family of "travelers" trying to go straight (sort of) in upper middle class America.

Oh, yes, this is modern television descended directly from Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Driver, forgettable in every role she's had since Good Will Hunting, plays the fiercely devoted, heroin-addicted mother who violates her parole at least three times every episode. Izzard is her Prince Deceptively Charming, a raffish rogue who is also remarkably accurate with a pistol and a three wood (oddly, in this show, golf clubs are actually used to smash golf balls, not crania). A pair of street-smart teens and a cross-dressing little boy round out the cozy nuclear family, and it's one laugh after another for these wacky misfits.

The premise is set in motion when the family refuses to acknowledge the authority of the violent but not quite smart enough leader of the larger traveler clan, who has arranged a marriage for their daughter. After a sequence of absurd coincidences, they find themselves in a gated community McMansion recently purchased by a recently deceased couple who were unknown to their new community and apparently completely disconnected from the rest of the world ... or so it seems at first.

We're supposed to like this family because they really care about one another, exemplified by their greatest fear: that the parents will end up in jail and the kids in foster homes (I know that's the one that keeps the Doc and me up nights). The bad guys are people like the uptight, feckless lawyers and the perky, blonde head of the homeowners association (she has the fake arm). Like other F/X dramas (Rescue Me, The Shield), The Riches tries to refract societal mores in order to convince us that what we perceive as extremely unusual circumstances happen all the time to people just like us or someone we know.


Pretty preposterous, but probably no more so than police procedurals that wrap up impossible cases every hour. Besides, what were my other options? NBC showed The Black Donnellys. I watched the first five minutes of this "Irish brothers in the New York underworld" saga; we open in a bar, at the wake of the patriarch, and a fight breaks out. Did I mention the skirling bagpipe soundtrack? And they say The Sopranos demeans Italian-Americans with unflattering stereotypes.

CBS had CSI:Miami, but I vowed a few years ago to live a CSI-free life. What About Brian was on ABC, but didn't Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss mine all the creative energy out of this title in What About Bob back in the 1990's? For suspense, I suppose I could've tuned in Kansas State-DePaul in the NIT, just to see if K-State coach Bob Huggins would have a heart attack, but I'll get enough basketball this weekend. The free movie channels had An American in Paris, which I might watch but not admit it, and Hero (with Dustin Hoffman, not Jet Li).

So, until Studio 60 returns, I think I am stuck with The Riches on Monday nights. Or, horror of horrors, I could read a book.

"Dirt" under my fingernails

F/X has carved out Tuesday nights at 10:00 as the debut destination for its dramatic series, sometimes with success - The Shield, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck - sometimes not - Thief, Over There. I enjoy the former, except Nip/Tuck of late, enough that I am willing to give Dirt a few more chances. I skipped most of the pilot last week, but caught up on the replays and tuned in again last night to see where we were headed.

Very simple premise. Courteney Cox plays Lucy Spiller, the Type-A editor of two celebrity gossip ragmags - one lowbrow and the other lower brow. I can see why the pitch meeting for this one was an absolute home run (I think I scrambled a metaphor there, but stay with me). We are so fascinated by celebrity culture and gossip in this country that what could be more interesting than a show dramatizing that process? Sounds great, right?

The trick here is make fiction stranger than truth and more interesting, otherwise viewers will just flip over to Entertainment Tonight and the E! True Hollywood Story. And, for me anyway, it has to be funny, at least a few times an hour. This is why The Shield and Rescue Me work, because if there were no humor, you'd just get dragged into the amoral morass, and how much of that can you take every week?

So, is Dirt getting it done? Not yet. I'm not sure Cox can carry the show (ironically, last night we learned that Spiller's job is in jeopardy). She's got the right, ADHD, barracuda approach that we all suspect this character has to have, but she still hasn't quite shaken the cheery neuroticism of Monica Geller. Getting the magazine published still has a little too much "let's put on a show" vibe. And she always looks a little too good on camera. Her character has the requisite personal shortcomings, but the director needs to let her look ugly as well. The good news is that she seems to have a drinking problem, so we can only hope that there's a major bender in her future, with substantial plot-altering consequences.

I'm equally conflicted about Ian Hart as the "functioning schizophrenic" paparazzo, Don Konkey, the Mickey Rooney to Cox's Judy Garland. If the writers haven't given Cox's character enough flaws, they have overcompensated with Hart's. This guy has a shrine to a his dead cat, thinks that it's raining blood, and is haunted by the corpse of a dead actress. Oh, and even though he hears voices, he's also a Rainman-type savant when it comes to movie trivia and sports statistics. This should do wonders for the image of treatable mental illness.

Outside of these codependent business partners, we have an array of characters looking to grab a little camera time and audience interest. Josh Stewart plays Holt McLaren, a Sean Penn type whose talent hasn't always overcome his nonmatinee idol looks and is overshadowed by his beautiful but clueless starlet girlfriend. After some initial exposition, McLaren sets the plot in motion by making a Faustian deal with Spiller that may or may not have caused a friend, Konkey's corpse buddy, to kill herself. Jeffrey Nordling is quite convincing as a Spiller's scheming boss who leers at a young staffer named, get this, Willa. Rick Fox stretches his chops to play an NBA superstar set up for something by Spiller and Konkey. If those last two sentences sound gratuitous, well, exactly.

Are you getting all this? Of course you are, because this is what it takes to follow 21st century dramatic television. The plot twists and turns until you have to go to a message board to sort it out with fellow devotees. You find a character to like and then he/she does something morally offensive but defensible or at least understandable, and now you have to stay tuned to see which way the character goes. I'll do so grudgingly, but not if there is something better on, which seems like a pretty good possibility.