Coffee and TV: Billions
“TV drama series all have a limited lifespan, or else become parodies of themselves - normally within three years.” This is something I read recently in a book about narrative and structure that I downloaded on a whim, and it seems mostly true? I am well into the self-parody years of Billions but that is not diminishing my enjoyment. It is the best worst show I have ever watched.
Billions actively repels any kind of critical analysis because the characters are all so gloriously two-dimensional. If you catch yourself, the day after watching Billions, thinking about how or why something happened on Billions, you are committing fanfiction. This makes it the perfect show for right now because the last thing I want to do is think.
Have you seen Billions? If not, let me back way up. Billions is a Showtime drama about a billionaire (natch) hedge fund manager named Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, who is played by Brody from Homeland. His enemy is U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), a zealous crusader against financial crimes who always wears suspenders AND sometimes a vest. Inconveniently and also wildly implausibly but I mean, just wait, Chuck is married to Dr. Wendy Rhoades, who works for Axe! She is his company’s performance coach/in-house psychological masseuse, a job that requires her to wear an infinite series of bodycon dresses with cutouts near the neckline and sternly but lovingly give pep talks to Axe Capital employees. The Axe employees are all either clowns or gangsters, with the exception of “Dollar” Bill, who is a clownish gangster. Wendy is played by Rachel Menken from Mad Men (ok, her name is Maggie Siff.) The first season hinges on how on earth Chuck and Wendy will stay married as Chuck’s all-consuming professional life hinges on destroying Wendy’s boss and Wendy’s all-consuming professional life hinges on helping her boss evade her husband/the law while doing all kinds of illegal things to make huge piles of money. The season ends with Chuck and Axe basically singing “Confrontation” from Les Mis to each other. The entire show hinges on the idea that Axe and Chuck will eternally be at war with each other, but are prevented from ever fully defeating each other because of their shared loyalty to and dependence on Wendy!
Except, whoops, that’s not actually true because by Season 3, (spoilers ahead obviously), Chuck and Axe are … pals? Chuck has sacrificed the intense moral fervor that 100% defined his character in S1 because now he wants to run for governor and he’s willing to ally himself with whoever he needs to, including his despicable rich father, in order to win. To distract us from the fact that the show has thrown its entire original premise in the garbage can, Billions then introduces a new main character to round out the foursome: Axe Cap intern turned boss Taylor Mason, who shares Chuck’s habit of speaking in implausibly detailed, syntactically complex rapid-fire paragraphs and Axe’s habit of being a lizard who only comes truly alive when large amounts of money are on the table. Also not to make too big a deal of this but Tyler is nonbinary— the show admirably does not make a big deal of it, except to use some characters’ bigoted responses to Taylor’s pronouns as a way to demonstrate that those characters are dumb. Anyway, the distraction works: we forgive Axe and Chuck for no longer being sworn enemies and focus instead on getting to know Tyler. Then Axe punishes Taylor for being more successful at running Axe Capital than he was (he’s temporarily out of commission because of some legal trouble) by ruining Taylor’s budding romantic relationship with a Silicon Valley founder. Now there is a new bloody rivalry to pursue!
This show has to overcome a lot of structural obstacles in order to succeed, and mostly it does by just ignoring them and running roughshod over them. Often Billions employs the time-honored strategy of having all the actors say their lines very, very quickly and decisively to obscure that their world is made out of total nonsense. To be clear: I admire this! I admire the chutzpah of setting a show in the world of finance, which I’m pretty sure is boring as shit in real life. I’ve watched 4 seasons of Billions and I still couldn’t coherently explain to you what a hedge fund technically … does. Please do not explain it to me. I’m just saying this as a compliment to the show, which has wisely decided never to explain it. The Axe Cap employees sit at computers, and make trades based on information that they have found out from … somehow. Crimes, often. Sometimes a character will write a complex equation on a whiteboard, to show that they are Great At Math.
Wendy and Chuck’s baseline implausibility as a couple is another big stumbling block that the show wisely ignores. Not that a mega hot babe who is also the evil sidekick of a hedge fund guy would never be attracted to a rabbity nerd like Chuck, but just that the characters as written don’t have anything in common except being super intense. The first season puts a lot of emphasis on their S&M sexual relationship - Wendy is S - but we never really see her getting as much out of it as Chuck does, and it’s a relief that the show mostly outgrows it as a gimmick.
Chuck and Wendy also have kids, who we see onscreen for entire seconds in S1 and then basically never again. They do not factor into anyone’s schedule or decisions except in one scene where the Rhoades’s financial well-being is threatened and Wendy tremulously considers the possibility that they will have to transfer to “Brooklyn Heights Public School.” You can tell that the writers regret making the Rhoadeses parents and by this point also probably wish they’d shipped these supposed kids off to boarding school in Switzerland via one line of dialogue circa season 2 rather than having to occasionally insert a mention of “the sitter.”
What else. I guess I am over it by now but I hate it when the show has “real people” on it (mostly Mark Cuban and various celebrity chefs.)
I feel better for having gotten those complaints off my chest because other than that, this show is obviously completely perfect? There are only 6 or 7 episodes of season 5 because they had to shut down production due to, you know, the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic. I DESPERATELY hope when they start it back up again they don’t feel any obligation to incorporate the events of the past 7 months into the ongoing storyline. I don’t want to see Axe in a mask, or to have Wendy forced to WFH in sweatpants instead of stilettos. I need Billions to continue to be as wholly divorced from reality as it currently is, so that I can keep loving it as much as I currently do.
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