Television, Wall Street

Standard Of Review: Showtime's 'Billions' Shows Promise

It's not without flaws, but Billions has a strong group of actors and an interesting premise.

By  
on

Billions Showtime logoIn the opening scene of the first episode of Showtime’s buzz-generating new drama Billions, Chuck Rhoades, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, engages in sadomasochistic sex in which, among other things, his chest is burned with a cigarette and subsequently peed on.

My first thought while watching this scene was that I would love to be a fly on the wall as current U.S. Attorney for the S.D.N.Y. Preet Bharara curls up on his couch for some Sunday night TV and turns on this show. But as I watched more of Billions, an entertaining and well-acted drama, I realized that the scene was a microcosm for the show’s flaws (this review will contain spoilers through the second episode, which aired Sunday night).

Billions stars Paul Giamatti as Chuck, who, despite his sterling 81-0 prosecution record, faces accusations that he is soft on financial crime. Accordingly, Chuck begins to set his sights on Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis), the multi-billionaire founder of hedge fund Axe Capital. Complicating matters is the fact that Chuck’s wife Wendy (Maggie Siff) works at Axe Capital as a psychologist and performance coach and is one of Axe’s trusted advisors. Despite this apparent conflict, Chuck and his team of AUSAs begin to investigate Axe’s firm for possible criminal securities violations.

Axe is a far cry from Lewis’s most famous two roles:  as the troubled Nicholas Brody on Homeland and as the stoic Richard Winters on Band of Brothers (I have never seen The Forsyte Saga or Wolf Hall so I cannot comment on those performances). Lewis is clearly having a lot of fun as an intense master of the universe, but he also shows Axe’s softer side, such as a scene in the first episode in which Axe gives scholarships to the children of the partners at his former financial firm, who all died on September 11. Lewis plays the scene with complete sincerity, and expertly portrays how his survival has weighed on him for so many years.

Wendy is the show’s most interesting character, particularly because I cannot remember another character quite like her. As the in-house performance coach for Axe Capital, Wendy straddles a dangerous line. On one hand, as a trained therapist, she does important work in coaching and helping the legions of overstressed employees of Axe Capital, in turn improving the work they do for the fund. Like any good therapist, Wendy knows what makes her patients tick and is thus able to help them improve. On the other hand, Wendy’s salary is paid by Axe Capital, and her ultimate boss is Axe. This tension manifests itself in a scene where Axe uses Wendy to threaten a former Axe Capital trader who is fired by Axe after the trader performs poorly during a compliance drill. Wendy goes to the trader’s house and utilizes what she knows about the trader’s personal background to deliver Axe’s threat to not bad-mouth him to potential future employees. Siff, best known for playing Don Draper’s Season 1 lover Rachel Menken on Mad Men, has been excellent so far as she portrays Wendy’s unease at her dual responsibilities.

So far, Chuck does not work as a character as well as Axe or Wendy. As opposed to Axe – who came from nothing, and as another character snidely notes, went to Hofstra instead of the Ivy League – Chuck was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the son of a prominent New York City businessman. However, with his perpetually sad eyes and the way he repeatedly chomps on junk food like takeout hamburgers, I had a hard time believing Giamatti as a rich kid with a very attractive wife (that being said, I will fully admit that I may have gotten too hung up on appearances – for all I know there are plenty of blue-blooded individuals that look and act just like Giamatti). I am a huge Giamatti fan in general; I think his performances in Sideways and Win Win are Oscar-worthy. But I don’t think this is the right part for him. I actually think the main roles should have been switched. Giamatti would have been fantastic as Axe, a schlubby guy from a lower-middle class background who uses his intelligence to rise to be a hedge fund kingpin as the success goes to his head, and I am sure Lewis could pull off playing Chuck.

Among the surprisingly deep supporting cast (which also includes David Costabile and Jeffrey DeMunn), Toby Leonard Moore is my favorite as Chuck’s enjoyably quippy as AUSA Bryan Connerty. Moore also played Wilson Fisk’s right-hand-man James Wesley on Daredevil, so if he shows up on the upcoming half-season of Suits as Harvey Specter’s new associate, Moore will win Standard of Review Bingo. On the other hand, Malin Akerman, who plays Axe’s wife Lara, has not gotten much to do so far except to perpetually support Axe in any situation (Akerman : Billions :: William Devane : The Grinder).

Sponsored

While most of the cast is solid, the show’s biggest flaw is that it plays like a higher-brow Entourage. Billions enjoys flaunting Axe’s wealth for the audience, including shots of his massive house or his personal helicopter. Moreover, although traders at hedge funds are not known for their tact, I cringed at some of the dialogue uttered by Axe’s employees. In one staff meeting, a trader tells everyone that a certain stock is “going to pop like a prom queen’s cherry.” At another point, Axe’s COO tells him that “we have to be more pure than the Virgin Mary before her first period.” If I had told you that those lines were uttered by Johnny Drama on Entourage instead of the characters on Billions, you probably would have believed me.

Billions also emulates Entourage with its proclivity for gratuitous sex scenes. In addition to the sadomasochism scene mentioned above , the second episode depicts one of Chuck’s female employees snorting cocaine off a naked woman while having sex with her. The ostensible point of the scene is so that Axe’s goon can record the employee doing cocaine on camera in order to blackmail her. But that could have been accomplished without a prolonged and pointless sex scene. When the employee told Axe’s goon that no one would care that she had sex with women, it almost felt like an inadvertent critique of the show; I imagine the writers including the sex scene merely in order to appeal to the prurient interests of certain of Showtime’s viewers.

Moreover, the show needs more political balance. As has been reported exhaustively, finance kings are really good at avoiding prison (as evidenced by the dearth of top executives who went to prison for their roles in the 2008 economic crisis). However, each of the first two episodes of Billions has featured a scene that tried to garner sympathy for these executives. In the first episode, Chuck’s father is not able to convince Chuck to show leniency toward Chuck’s father’s good friend, who Chuck has known since he was a child. And in the second episode, Chuck runs into an executive who is about to go to prison and subsequently expresses regret due to the pain the imprisonment is going to cause the executive’s children. While it is important to depict the human element in any criminal prosecution, Billions has been too one-sided so far, portraying these individuals in a positive light without showing the damage they have caused.

Despite some flaws, Billions certainly has promise, with a strong group of actors and an interesting premise. Therefore, I plan to continue watching and occasionally writing about it throughout the season, even if it never becomes Preet Bharara’s favorite show.

Sponsored

Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at harrygraff19@gmail.com. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.

Topics

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,