BY DAVID KRONKE >TV CRITIC

The message in the first four episodes of the second season seems to be that conning people for a living is such grueling and perilous work, you're probably better off doing dull but honest work.

As the show ended its first season, the world Wayne Malloy (Eddie Izzard) had worked so hard and so dishonestly to build for his family was threatening to collapse.

After having conned blustery businessman Hugh Panetta (Greg Henry) into believing that he and his wife, Dahlia (Minnie Driver), were attorney Doug Rich and his wife, Cherien (both died in a car wreck), someone from the real Doug's life threatened to expose him as a fraud.

Moreover, the unhinged Dale (Todd Stashwick), a fellow Irish Traveler (a nomadic scam artist), was also making life miserable for the Malloys.

Well. They had it easy in season one. As season two progresses, the complications mount exponentially.

Wayne tells Dahlia to take the kids and vamoose; he'll catch up to them later and mop up the mess left back at the house with Doug's old friend. The mess has gotten much uglier, as Dale has shown up, as has a drunken Hugh with a gun, soon followed by a neighborhood security guard.

Meanwhile, an unhappy neighbor, Nina (Margo Martindale), elects to join Dahlia on the lam, and their car promptly breaks down in a small Texas town, where they encounter a gun-toting lunatic not happy that they're trying to steal his van.

And that's just tonight. "The Riches" goes so crazy in putting obstacles in the Malloys' path that it rarely allows them to relish the art of the scam. Moreover, after just resolving one character from the real Doug's past, episode four employs the gambit again.

Worse, after placing the Malloys in sundry dangerous situations, it relies upon convenient plotting to allow them to wriggle free. In next week's episode, for example, not one but two plot contrivances are necessary in order for Wayne to come to the rescue just as things are getting ugly for Dahlia and the kids when a grift goes awry.

So that doesn't hold out a lot of hope that the avalanche of bad fortune will be resolved very satisfactorily for the Malloys in future episodes. And tonally, the show seems a smidgen off - the escalating mayhem in tonight's episode feels like farce but is presented in too dour a fashion to play like it. Simply put, the show's satirical portrait of the American Dream should be funnier.

Still, it's fun to watch Izzard and Driver go through their paces briskly.

"Dreams are complicated," sighs one character in tonight's episode; the Malloys' nightmares are even more complicated.

David Kronke, (818) 713-3638
david.kronke@dailynews.com
www.insidesocal.com/tv/

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THE RICHES

>What: Second-season premiere of the story of a family of scam artists posing as an affluent family.

>Where: FX.

>When: 10 tonight.

>In a nutshell: Are they digging their hole too deep?