The Riches: Eddie Izzard has a TV show! - TWoP Forums p 25:
WollamEnots: Looks like F/X has done it again. Always Sunny, Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me (okay, I'll forgive them 'Dirt'), The Riches shows immense promise. It's smart, wickedly funny and a great fit for Eddie's talents. The interview scene in #2 was priceless. Shows like this are so far and above the common faire that it makes Desperate Anatomy Whisperer hehee look sad by comparison. Damn, this show is good.

I wasn't as into the second episode as the pilot - Like the RVing-around traveller life more than the pretend-to-be-buffers life maybe, but still yes seems a fine show. the interview scene, was it priceless? to me it was sort of confusingly funny, his allovertheplacenss. I guess I did laugh aloud: " I'm lucky. Je suis lucky. I just work really hard. I'm like a nocturnal owl."

dzykate: All caught up! Whew! Now, my long post:
--And I liked that they played on the fact that Wayne/Eddie is travel-sized and was falling out of Doug's clothes.
Me too, kostgard! And what I loved, from a character-development point of view, was that Wayne came out in the way-too-big jacket apparently for the sole purpose of amusing the rest of the family. It’s a small beat, but a perfect one. Or, as you put it, sleepy 67:
--The overwhelming fact of the show so far is that no matter their bickering this is a family who love one another.
Now, switching gears:
--I'm with hating Dahlia---but not because she's a selfish junkie … but because she appears to be the worst con artist EVER.
Yeah, this has struck me as well, zumpee. Is she so bad because she’s currently so strung out and self-absorbed that she can’t be bothered to put on the con and doesn’t care about the consequences? Or is it because “Mom’s crazy”? Bit of both, maybe, which could be great. Both the kids’ matter-of-fact acknowledgement of her potentially cover-blowing behavior in this episode and Wayne’s “Oh, Mom’s home!” comment when Dahlia started throwing things in the pilot suggest that she’s always been unpredictable. This makes me wonder if Wayne’s marriage to her isn’t another manifestation of his risk-seeking personality. Potentially very interesting.
However, I’m a little worried about the particular flavor of crazy we’re getting from Dahlia, and what it might mean for the show overall. ‘Cause in this episode, she was veering awfully close to tiresome, cartoonish, dumbass hostile-hick crazy, I thought. Is Dahlia compelling or is she totally annoying? Is this show going to be awesome or not? Those are the questions, and her accent makes the answers difficult to determine. huh.
As Henry VIII said to the Pope, “Stick with me, my story gets better.”
I don’t have a problem with Minnie Driver’s execution of the accent; what raises the alarm is the decision to go with this particular strain of extreme Southern backwoods, which we TV audiences have been trained to interpret in a certain way.
If in this past episode Dahlia had been speaking with, say, a neutral mid-Atlantic kind of accent (like her kids do and like her husband sorta does), would her behavior have struck me differently? I think it would have. For starters, it would've be clearer that she buries the money not because she’s an idiot or because it’s a wacky hick thing to do (Joy from “Earl” would bury money too, wouldn’t she?), but because she’s barely holding it together, clinging to the old ways, and so hesitant to “believe the lie” that Wayne’s proposing. It would've been clearer that her suspicious behavior at the impound lot, picking a fight with the neighbor association chick, and returning the RV to the spot where it’s likely to get towed again and deepen suspicion are all totally reckless, and thus, a serious threat to her family’s safety and future. And it's unfortunate, but I think a more neutral accent would've made her indecision and bouts of temper seem more remarkable and scarier, driving home how dangerous indecision and an uncontrollable temper are when your life is built on maintaining the upper hand in a complicated con.
Is the show playing these notes, or am I just projecting? A lot of folks have posted with praise for Dahlia’s complexity so I guess y'all are seeing it too. (Yay!) But God, I would hate it if TPTB have deliberated chosen comic WT wackiness and played-out, spoof-the-suburbanites shtick when there’s so much promise here. MD’s comments in the press that this is maybe the best role she’s ever had do give me hope that Dahlia will turn out to defy stereotypical expectations and be smart and complicated and a worthy partner to Wayne. A partner who’s crazy occasionally threatens everything. A true wildcard instead of cheap, junkie rageholic redneck joke.