TV review: Warped take on the American Dream is oddly compelling

Eddie Izzard as Wayne Molloy and fellow English actor Minnie Driver as his wife Dahlia in The Riches. Photo / Supplied

Last night's pilot of The Riches (C4, Mondays, 9.25pm) began in jaunty, if sardonic fashion, with a high school reunion. It was your usual reunion: a bunch of people who never liked each other when they were young, turn up in the hope that the horrible Tracey is now fat, divorced and unemployed.

Nobody really remembers people they didn't like at high school, so it was a nice conceit to have Wayne Molloy - on the way, with his three oddball kids, to pick up mum from prison - to pop in and pretend to be one of the class of "Wildcats". He gave a rousing speech, a rumination on the trials and triumphs of the old class. Mary had come out of a five-year coma. Somebody had come through "a dose of the clap", an unluckier somebody had had a "botched gastric by-pass".

While dad stole the show, the kids picked pockets and purses. Then the Molloys got back on the road, got pulled over by a cop, one of the kids faked an epilepsy fit ... We were getting the idea. The Molloys are not your average American family.

Dad is played by Eddie Izzard (the cross-dressing English comic) who is married to "traveller" royalty, Dahlia, played by English actor Minnie Driver.

They belong to a large clan of travellers, all crims and some "chromosomally challenged". They have their own challenges: youngest son Sam, is a miniature cross-dresser; mum is a drug addict.

They're not too worried about Sam. It could be worse. "Yeah, could be on crack."

They are soon to have bigger worries. The head traveller is dying and his successor, the possibly psychopathic Dale, has decreed that daughter Didi is to marry one of the chromosomally challenged clan. He and dad fight. Dad decides he's had it with the clan (he only married in) and the family take to the road in their motorhome while mum's taking a junkie kip. Oh, and dad stole great wads of clan cash before leaving.

There is honour among thieves, to a point and the extended traveller clan make the Soprano clan look like clean-living, well-adjusted citizens.

There was a madcap scene involving a motorhome chase, then it goes horribly wrong. There was a head-on crash with a wealthy couple. The man asked dad: "Am I hurt?" He had a very large branch stuck in his chest. "Aah, yeah. A bit," said dad. The rich geezer was about to be dead.

This is all by way of getting the family to their new lives. They roll the car, and the bodies into a lake, steal their wallets and the keys to their brand-spanking new mini McMansion in a gated community called - in a clear clue about what awaits them, and us - Eden Falls.

That's quite some set-up, and makes The Riches sound like a comedy scumbag thieving travellers on the run impersonate rich middle-American family; much slapstick will ensue. Dad is passing himself off as a lawyer: "a liar", in the lingo of some rich creep at the golf club. But this is darker, and more nuanced, than that joke implies.

'What life do you want us to live?" asked mum. "The American dream - we're going to steal it," said dad.

Izzard is already giving a terrific impersonation of a man in the grip of his "existential crisis". The family are already trying to do what all families attempt to live a life within a family, to hold that family together. They love each other; they are dysfunctional; they're caught between the past and whatever future they can create. It's an old story, but, so far, this looks like being a compellingly told one.