Dirty, Sexy, Funny
“Money is the root of all evil,” declares Nick George (Peter Krause) during the opening narration of ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money, and you figure Nick’s got to know what he’s talking about it. He’s spent his entire life around the super-rich Darling family, a collection of messed up kids who are now a collection of seriously messed up young adults. Nick was the regular kid on the outside looking in, because his father was the family’s lawyer. Fortunately, Nick has grown up to be a lawyer who works for charitable causes and is otherwise nothing like his father.
Doesn’t sound like much of a premise, does it? Fortunately for the future of Dirty Sexy Money, Nick’s dad dies suddenly and Darling family patriarch Tripp (Donald Sutherland) makes him an offer he can’t refuse: millions of dollars a year, for himself and his favorite charities, if he takes his Dad’s job. The job that ruined his own childhood and drove his mother to light out for parts unknown. Who says Reaper is the only show about our hero being trapped in a deal with the devil?
The first ten minutes of Dirty Sexy Money go to a pretty bleak place. But once Nick takes the “lawyer” job, which is really about providing a moral center to the comically out-of-touch Darling kids, things get funny in a hurry. Hard-partying Jeremy (Seth Gabel) wins a yacht in a poker game, but questions of how to get the pink slip are rapidly overridden when the NYPD discovers the boat’s crew of illegal immigants and put Jeremy under arrest. Karen (Natalie Zea) has been in love with Nick since she was a little girl, and he’s now got to negotiate her prenup for the latest in a series of doomed relationships with other men. Rev. Brian (Glenn Fitzgerald) wants to get his illegitimate son into a tony boarding school. Married politician Patrick (William Baldwin) needs help breaking up with his transsexual girlfriend. And Tripp’s wife Letitia (Jill Clayburgh)? Apparently she was having an decades-long affair with Nick’s dad.
At first blush, Dirty Sexy Money sounds like yet another soap opera about the trials and tribulations of incredibly rich people. I am not a fan of those shows. But this is not one of those shows. Dirty Sexy Money refuses to take itself as seriously as its rich-kid characters take themseves. Its closest analog may actually be, of all things, Arrested Development. Like Jason Bateman’s character in that classic cult comedy, Krause is the voice of reason in the center of a swirling maelstrom of insanity. And Krause strikes the right balance, laughing at the ridiculous situations his charges have gotten themselves into while never forgetting to treat them like real human beings. Even if that means grabbing Brian by the ear and pinning him to the floor because he’s being a complete jerk.
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