Filthy Rich

A welcome throwback to the type of playful, Spelling-esque silliness that’s been missing from primetime for too long.

Filthy Rich isn’t exactly high art, but it’s satisfyingly soapy, with some decent performances and a couple of chuckles that show us that it’s not taking itself at all seriously.

Filthy Rich is a bit of a Franken-soap, seemingly stitched together from pieces of other series. Yet it works, at least kind of, as a guilty pleasure, unabashedly embracing its trashiness with sly wit and reasonably clever twists. As kickoffs to the broadcast TV season go, Fox could have, and indeed has, done worse.

Fox’s latest prime-time soap, “Filthy Rich,” won’t be mistaken for great TV but its pilot episode is a hoot. Future installments prove uneven.

Too traditional for its own good, it needs to mix things up on a grand scale.

I watched three episodes and I didn't even hate it. Filthy Rich is, to use the backhanded compliment du jour for these times, the "perfect escapist series to help you forget about the world," and it's so low stress, it requires only percentage points of your brain to enjoy.

There’s a sort of Ryan Murphy-esque willingness to simply do the most that’s undeniably entertaining and just as undeniably frustrating. Yet a fatal combination of tonal inconsistency and pulled punches will probably confine “Filthy Rich” to the ash heap in time, despite the best efforts of its perfectly-cast star.

Filthy Rich wants to be more clever than it is, but its overly dramatic plot twists (Eugene’s body isn’t discovered in the plane crash) can be spotted a mile away by anyone who’s seen even a single episode of Dallas.

It's Dynasty minus the nasty. [28 Sep - 11 Oct 2020, p.9]

Cattrall does not disappoint in Fox’s “Filthy Rich,” turning her role, as the very soapily named Margaret Monreaux (shades of Dominique Devereaux, Diahann Carroll’s character in “Dynasty”), into an exercise in gentle camp. ... The rest of the show? It’s mediocre, in the way “Revenge” and “Nashville” were — but, if you’re in the mood for trashy nonsense infused with scandal, face slaps, and big money, which has some pandemic allure, it’s here for you.

A show whose first three episodes don’t prove themselves to be filthy enough for the audience or as rich as Cattrall deserves.

Save for Kreiling, the performances — including those of Eric’s Lady Macbeth-ish wife (Olivia Macklin), her showboating reverend brother (Aaron Lazar) and the Monreauxes’ legal counsel (Steve Harris) — range from the satisfying enough (Cattrall) to the downright amateurish, and there isn’t anything of the style and self-aware camp of Filthy Rich’s clear predecessor, Empire, to make up for the spare characterizations and rote storylines.