The Riches is a complicated show, and the first episode plays like the first hour of the hottest Sundance film: Driver guzzles cold medicine, shoots heroin and comforts her cross-dressing young son. You can hear the indie circuit creaming its jeans from here. But The Riches has more than 90 minutes’ worth of story to tell, and it’s the subsequent episodes and their surprising dexterity that have us hooked.

After watching the first episode—a premise-heavy, plot-laden pilot if ever there was one—we wondered about the feasibility of the show. In the golden age of Googleability, wouldn’t it be tough to live as someone else? To pretend to be a lawyer, or to register your kids for school without birth certificates? And yet The Riches manages to satisfy our credibility questions smoothly and simply, largely by admitting that it is difficult to pull off these kinds of scams. Difficult, but not impossible. Especially when your family is led by someone as grandly realized as Izzard’s Wayne.

Izzard, best known for his brilliant stand-up (performed in drag), is a sight to behold here, even if his accent occasionally slips just the tiniest bit. Wayne is simultaneously wracked by guilt—that his wife went to prison instead of him, that he isn’t raising his children properly by either traveler or buffer standards, that he isn’t providing well enough for them—and endlessly confident in his ability to convince people of anything. Izzard deftly handles the ambiguity, and the passionate chemistry between Wayne and Dahlia lends the series a sense of urgency.

Wayne and Dahlia’s children round out the Malloy clan: Son Cael and daughter Delilah cope not just with teenagedom but also with their evolving consciences, while little brother Sam appears to be dealing with some significant gender-identity issues. (No one in the family seems bothered by it; after all, they inhabit a world of disguise and misdirection. Who’s to say what anyone’s “real” self is?) Mercifully, the show is absent of any Sopranos-style demon-spawn issues, and Cael, Delilah and Sam are legitimate characters unto themselves.

As the Malloys transform into the Riches and artfully con everyone in their fancy Baton Rouge gated community, they’re confronted again and again by the gross injustice of the general world, by pervasive corruption in white-collar America, and the somewhat obvious but not unremarkable point that everyone is scamming everyone else. Sure, the Malloys may have taken the suburban facade idea a little further than the rest of us do, and their lies are more carefully cultivated and more tenuously preserved. But we’re all faking, at least some of the time, all trying to convince the world that we’re smart or sophisticated or wealthy or deserving; how worthy we are of respect or devotion; that we’re good at our jobs and are responsible members of our families. We’re not, nor can we be, nor need we be. Rare is the show that can touch on and elucidate these themes without beating us over the head with them. Rarer still is a show like The Riches that makes us enjoy it.

The Riches debuts Monday 12 at 9pm on FX.