"The Riches": Troublemakers in paradise

“The Riches” reminds me a bit of “Big Love” the first time I saw it. I wasn't sure whether to like these people or despise them, wasn't sure I bought the premise or if it was an "only in your dreams, Hollywood" concoction.

And yet, at the end of the hour, I wanted to see more.

That's a pretty good endorsement for a series, debuting 9 p.m. Monday on FX, that is clearly playing hard-to-get with its audience.

As the show opens, Eddie Izzard is tooling around in a beat-up RV with his kids. Everything about the scene says shady business, so when a cop pulls the rig over, it's not surprising. Then they swing by the old grey-bar hotel to pick up Minnie Driver. Minnie Driver! I guess we're supposed to like these grifters.

  More strange turns. A welcome-back picnic by a whole community of disreputable looking hillbilly-types. A bizarre fight. A high-speed RV chase. A fateful collision -- and the next thing you know, our family-on-the-run finds itself parked. In someone else's home. In a gated community, on a golf course. Which they will live in until someone finds them out, or until one of their fellow gypsies stumbles upon them and says, “My, my, my, haven't you come a ways?”

  This could be a parable about the American dream. Upward mobility and all that. Or, it could be a satire of the middle class and the pointlessness of said mobility. Or, it could simply be a train wreck.

  “The Riches” is the latest roll of the dice from FX, which isn't afraid to try something viewers might possibly hate (“Dirt” and “Starved” come to mind), or give writing and producing contracts to young men with off-kilter ideas. Shawn Ryan's spec script for “The Shield” is an example, though the story of Dmitry Lipkin, creator of “The Riches,” might trump that. A native of Russia, Lipkin arrived in Louisiana when he was 10 and worked his way to New York, where he wrote plays. This is his first TV anything.

  “I wanted to write a show about a family who pretends to be someone who they're not. I always felt that's sort of what I was doing in my own life. I'm sort of an immigrant refugee. I wanted to capture that oddness and that outside perspective of America,” said Lipkin at a January press event for “The Riches.”

  Part of the disruptive nature of the first episode might stem from the fact that half of it was reshot when FX changed directors. They may like to gamble over on basic cable's riskiest channel, but that doesn't mean they're not aiming for mass appeal. (At the same press event, Driver likened the first director's effort to an ultra-cool Sundance film -- not exactly praise in the TV business.)

  “Dirt” is a case where FX overshot. Originally, the tabloid drama was supposed to be all about the creepy photographer guy. Then Courteney Cox was added, she became the poster girl, but the show wasn't really about her … oh well.

  There's always the chance “The Riches” will go down that “Dirt” road, but I'm thinking not. Two words why: Minnie Driver.

  “You define your career as an actor by what you say no to, oddly, and I don't say yes very often,” Driver said. “When I read this, it was just and away the best part I've ever been offered. I knew that this was someone who had become anything, could go anywhere, and that this was like a springboard into something completely unknown and spontaneous. She's the greatest character I've ever played.”