Our San Francisco Chronicle TV critic, Tim Goodman, recently urged us to watch a new show on FX called “The Riches”. It’s about a family of “Travelers” (think Gypsies, without the ethnic implications) and how they outsmart and rip off mainstream Americans who are called “Buffers” in the show.
I like the acting, but I signed off about halfway into the current show, when Doug Rich BSs his way through an introductory speech to his new staff at the firm where he’s pretending to be a lawyer, then the family fails to BS its way into a private school. The problem is that we viewers don’t know whose side we are supposed to take. We don’t identify with the Riches who are not a particularly attractive or likeable lot, and we are smarter than the real estate office that Doug Rich BSs with his nonsense speech that is supposed to be a tour de force.
Aristotle figured this out a while back, by the way. Dramatic appeal in tragedies comes from the “tragic flaw” in an otherwise heroic protagonist, while the protagonist in a comedy, our representative in what can be a very chaotic tableaux, is an essentially good person of modest abilities who is striving for something better. (Thanks to the nice De Paul University syllabus notes I found to refresh myself on this topic. )
Ineffective advertising is often bad because of this very failing. Who are we in this scenario? What problem of ours is being solved? The audience is not given anything credible or of sufficient weight to identify with. A straw man problem is presented and then solved, but we don’t care because we never got involved in the first place.