The Riches: A Review of the Audacious New FX Series

Who Are You Really, Wanderer? Maybe I'm a King.

As you watch the first season of the Riches, trying to get a grasp of what it is exactly, that will be the answer it coyly delivers, over and over. "Maybe I'm a King."

The Riches definitely seems rich. The characters are strong, the acting exciting and convincing. Minnie Driver, Eddie Izzard and family really make us believe in these people. Who these people are, are "travellers". Basically they are American Gypsies that live by the con, duping members of 'legitimate' society whom they refer to as buffers. That's a word charged with superstition and disdain, and it serves to separate them from their marks.

But that's just where the story starts. They've taken some knocks over the years, paid for their fringe life-style with a two year jail term for Dahlia(Driver), put up with regular harassment at the hands of law enforcement, and just recently taken a major set-back in the trailer community of thieves they've considered home when not on the road.

And now Wayne(Izzard) is feeling restless, or really the opposite of restless. He's tired of this kind of life and he wants something better for him and his family. He makes a decision that burns all their bridges with their extended family in the backwoods and takes off with his wife and three kids in their RV to make a new life for them, not that he has any ideas what it will be.

That's when a major tragedy turns into the kind of opportunity he doesn't know he's looking for; a chance to steal the American Dream. All of a sudden the family of travellers has a new con. They will be buffers, but not for an hour, and not for a day. They will become a family of upstanding citizens...The Riches . They will be peasants masquerading as kings, taking on the identities of a couple that died suddenly in a road accident, on their way to their new home in Eden Falls, an upper-class community that has never met them.