The Riches

I caught the pilot episode of the Riches starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver and was left feeling a bit underwhelemed.

I like Izzard immensly, and Driver quite a bit, but the show as a whole doesn't really work in the first episode. I don't require every show be Nip/Tuck or the Shield in pacing, but it really doesn't help your show in your first episode when you rely on a chance encounter with a cop to supply most of your expository dialogue on a setting that might not be familiar with many viewers.

Irish Travellers might not be familiar to all viewers, and relying on two minutes of dialogue to set the stage doesn't really help. If somebody tuned in late they'd probably just assume the clan at their camp were just having a redneck family reunion.

It's interesting that FX keeps greenlighting shows where foreign actors play Americans, which isn't always bad such as in Nip/Tuck, but here some of the accents area bit dodgy and it's a bit hard to buy some of the characters.

I want to like this show, and I think that it can get better, but I don't know if the ratings will hold up if a show that was sortof billed as a bit of a comedy (Izzard in the promos only) keeps such a somber and slow pace.

About 15 minutes should have been cut from the pilot. As in professional wrestling more time to tell story is not necessarily going to be time well spent telling the story.