The Riches and the problem with rapidly escalating stakes.
Let’s kick this up a notch…
My love for FX’s The Riches is, this season, perfectly in line with my fear for The Riches. Maybe it’s some sort of law that people outside of show business do not know about, but why must sequels always play that coy game of oneupmanship with its audience. BIGGER explosions! MORE twists! FRILLIER dresses! What no one ever remembers is that most of us who enjoy watching certain characters over and over is that we thought the original frilliness was just fine. More after the jump…
It is this endless dramatic amplification that killed the legitimacy of Rescue Me, Weeds or even the Spider-Man franchise. I can see it happening to The Riches. Maybe this is a naive way to think in the current ultra-competitive climate in the world of original scripted programming on television, but I think show-runners often try far too hard to keep the audience that they’ve already won over watching their product. Fans of serialized drama often knock shows like CSI and Law & Order for being overly formulaic and disposable, but perhaps more credit should be given to those shows for keeping their characters consistent and never spiraling out of control.
Look at a show like Veronica Mars (which I’ve been rewatching this week). The brilliance of that series is that the stakes were always established at the front of the season and then the subsequent episodes were dedicated to addressing that problem. This kept things in check. There would certainly be twists and turns along the way but the characters never lost focus: who killed Lily Cane? Who blew up the school bus? Who is the campus rapist. In a way, this is also true of The Riches, but it appears the creator’s became antsy, or perhaps they didn’t have as much to say about the material at hand (one family pretending to be another) as they originally thought they did.
It does have something very positive working in its favor: performance. Performance can go a long way, and it is precisely the reason why a series (equally as volatile, if not more) like The Shield has managed to stick around so long without burning up. As long as Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver continue to bring their A game, we shouldn’t have to worry too much about the show’s future, but that isn’t to say it can keep it from totally being derailed into preposterousness (see: Weeds). In the word’s of one New York political reporter, “We’ll have to see how things play out.”
Tags: drama, FX, over-the-top, performance, The Riches, The Shield, Veronica Mars, Weeds
