He’s a lawyer who never attended law school. His name is Doug Rich, but it’s actually Wayne Malloy. His wife Dahlia — or is that Cherien? — is a drug addict (really) and a dental hygienist/personal assistant (not really). His youngest son is a girl, his next-door neighbour is a married gay alpaca breeder and his priest doesn’t believe in God.Such is the topsy-turvy suburban world of “The Riches,” the Eddie Izzard/Minnie Driver dramedy on FX whose first-season finale on Monday night caps one of the oddest and most thought-provoking pieces of storytelling on television.

It’s a dark, intricately spun tale about impostors. Trouble is, the impostors in this elastic reality aren’t necessarily whom you expect.

The story so far: Wayne and Dahlia Malloy (Izzard and Driver, Brits portraying Southerners) and their three adolescent children are “travellers” — passionate, itinerant Irish-American gypsies who run cons to put food on the table of their RV. Dahlia is fresh from prison when the family — inadvertently, but in a manner not entirely guiltless — helps cause a car wreck that kills Doug and Cherien Rich, a moneyed lawyer and dental assistant from Florida on their way to new jobs and lives in Louisiana.

Next thing you know, the Malloys have slipped inside the Riches’ skin, snatching an envelope of house keys from the wrecked car’s dashboard and hijacking the dead couple’s life — right down to the beautiful gated-community McMansion outside Baton Rouge. Wayne scams his way into a high-paying lawyer’s job with a local real-estate developer, and the family settles into mainstream life with “buffers” — their name for regular Americans who live humdrum, unexamined lives.

The Malloys decide, as Wayne puts it, to “steal the American dream.” But the dream itself can be just as larcenous — not entirely surprising in a community called (parse it) Edenfalls.

The suburban impostor is a TV genre rich with possibility, but rarely has it been plundered so slyly. For years, we’ve known that no one really lives like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson or the Cleavers; even the Bradfords of the late-1970s series “Eight is Enough,” with their calibrated-for-prime-time angst, were far happier than most.

Today, ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” stylises the American suburban experience like kabuki theatre, hammering home irony in roundhouse punches and portent-swollen voiceovers that leave little room for subtlety.

“The Riches” chooses another path. By focusing on the obvious impostors — the Malloy family, just trying to make their way in a dead guy’s house, but with everything to lose — it reveals more subtle pretenders. For in Edenfalls, as in many mannered suburban subdivisions, lies can be hidden everywhere. Most are less epic than the Malloys’, but many are just as intricate and deceptive.

Next door, the Burnses seem middle-aged and kindly, but Nina (Margo Martindale) is hooked on pills and deeply, quietly angry, and Jim (Bruce French) is gay, closeted and uncommunicative. Down the block lives an eyeliner-laden siren whose arm and marriage are both artificial.

The lawyer fired when Wayne is hired has an officeful of framed family photos — clipped from magazines. The deranged boss (Gregg Henry) hides his incompetence with bluster. And teenage Cael Malloy’s (Noel Fisher) only friends are spoiled thugs who tap his expertise for their high-school fake-ID mill.

Is anyone in Edenfalls living a genuine life? The answer is surprising: The Malloys are. At least, they’re trying.

Youngest son Sam (Aidan Mitchell), though he wears makeup and a barrette, expresses his life in raw honesty through a mural on his wall. Daughter Di Di (Shannon Woodward) breaks from her own fraud — a traveller-style arranged marriage to a dullard — to pursue buffer love. (“I have no idea who that girl has become,” Dahlia says to Wayne, oblivious of the irony.)

And Wayne and Dahlia, so embroiled in their external lies, push to be honest with each other even as they wonder whether their bogus life is bleeding into their real one.

As we delve into the Malloys’ deceptions, the people around them start coming into a stark, uniquely American focus. Despite their worries about becoming buffers, the Malloys are truly awake and struggling for something real. They know what’s at stake; even as they scorn the buffer lifestyle, they cherish its rewards.

“Things are different here,” Wayne tells Dahlia. If “a lie can produce a better result, then we lie. If we wanna stay here, if we want our kids to have this kind of life, go to school, learn to become somebody, then we gotta maintain the lie.”

The implication, as his words echo, is that this is true of everyone. In suburbia, home to an extended, uneasy dance of untruths and obfuscations, compromises must be made so that happiness can be heisted. But Dahlia, unconvinced, has a retort: “What if we start to forget the truth? You know, about who we are.”

At the end of next week’s season finale, in a McMansion bedroom late at night, two characters share a quiet exchange before things turn ugly.

Says one: “I’m sorry I’m not myself.”

The other, sensing the deeper meaning of the cliche, responds: “Who is?”

In a nation brimming with impostors, that may be the most succinct summation of the modern American suburb this side of John Updike.