As American as Marmite ... Eddie Izzard at a photocall for The Riches. Photograph: Charley Galley/Getty
It's always good to see British actors doing well in the Hollywood machine, so when you hear that Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver have bagged the leads on a new TV drama about a pair of con artists who sidle into the American suburban dream, it's worth checking out.
However, a quick glance through early reviews and blogs of The Riches, suggests that even though Izzard's character is supposed to be a master conman capable of convincing a stream of "duffers" that he is whoever he's decided to be on any given day, Izzard the actor has fallen at the first hurdle: getting his American accent right.
Unfortunately, the trailers seem to confirm this. Unlike Hugh Laurie's efforts on House (out of his coma next Thursday on Five, by the way), Marianne Jean-Baptiste on Without A Trace or Dominic West and Idris Elba on The Wire, he seems to have plumped for one of those vague transsatlantic drawls, neither quite there - or even here, really.
Which is a shame - along with Showtime (Huff, The L Word, Weeds, Brotherhood etc), FX has been creeping up on HBO over the last few years with some pretty credible non-network dramas: both the brutal bad cop/worse cop antics of The Shield and Dennis Leary's post-9/11 firefighters in Rescue Me have been worthwhile investments - and even the unhinged camp of Nip/Tuck has had its moments.
Hopefully The Riches will be strong enough to get over this, but it's the sort of detail that can niggle away - think about Clive Owen's faux noir voice in Sin City, Michael Caine's perfunctory nod across the Pond in The Cider House Rules, Sean "I'll just be Scottish again shall I?" Connery, etc etc. Does leave you wondering - couldn't they just have made his character British?
