'The Riches': On the Hot Seat

Lots of good stuff happened in The Riches last night. Yes, they are stretching my ability to suspend my disbelief by giving Doug, the “world’s best con man,” a very hard time faking his way through his job. His youngest son has no problem lapsing into French and faking his way through an impromptu school interview.

But what I really want to talk about is the chair. Yes, the chair.

At the end of the episode, Eddie Izzard’s Doug Rich spins around contentedly in his office chair, and it drops below desk height. His new colleagues watch this happen and are completely charmed by him. At first, it looks as if he did it on purpose, playing with the furniture like a big ol’ kid jumping on the bed.

The look on his face, though, makes me think he didn’t mean to do it. I don’t think he knew right away how to get the chair back up to the grown-ups’ height.

All that I could think of, watching this scene, was the time during my first week at my first full time job when I decided to go ahead and adjust my desk chair. The back fell right off of the thing. That’s right, folks, I hadn’t even been there for a week and already I was breaking things. No one could fix it, and we ended up swapping it with a chair from the conference room. To the best of my knowledge that broken chair is still there, the punishment meted out to the unlucky last person to arrive in a meeting. I left my mark early on.

So here’s to new jobs, and to desk chair shenanigans. I’ll happily spot Doug Rich 48 full hours to get used to the idea of pretending to be a lawyer before I pick on his abilities to fake his way through the job. After all, he is my comrade in the war for office furniture domination, and it’s dangerous out there.

By Liz McKeon

Michael Malone

Michael Malone, senior content producer at B+C/Multichannel News, covers network programming, including entertainment, news and sports on broadcast, cable and streaming; and local broadcast television. He hosts the podcasts Busted Pilot, about what’s new in television, and Series Business, a chat with the creator of a new program, and writes the column “The Watchman.” He joined B+C in 2005. His journalism has also appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Playboy and New York magazine.