Showtime’s Billions once made greed, revenge and awful people irresistible. Then Covid, cast upheaval and increasingly desperate plotting broke the spell.
Billions – currently showing on Paramount+ – had it all. A starry cast, a sky-high budget, a roster of great writers and dollops of acid rancour.
In the two main stars – Damian Lewis as slick hedge fund titan Bobby Axelrod, and Paul Giamatti as machiavellian S&M-obsessed attorney Chuck Rhoades – the series had the swagger to carry its sub-Shakespearean plots of revenge, redemption, flaws and riches.
There were sumptuous locations, ridiculous indulgences, seething feuds and whiplash plotting that turned more tables than Bruno’s legendary Capparello’s Pizzeria.
The stars turned their on-screen charisma into usable coin, helping us to overcome a formidable obstacle – the sheer unlikeability of the twin stars.
But as it was, there was plenty to love.
When it went wrong
Then we hit Season 5.
Cue the sound of clumping metal and tinkling glass. Cue the sounds of catastrophe looming and far-distant wailing.
The whole thing went off a cliff. There are good reasons for this – but let me pick out an amuse bouche.
In episode 10 – Liberty – there is a three minute one-shot dressed in pretentiously stagey silence in which Chuck Rhoades makes an omelette. Mike Prince and his daughter watch on, their casual stillness drenched in over-directed stillness.
Real-time omelette making is symptomatic of a show which has (a) run out of ideas (b) too ridiculously self absorbed for words.
Corey Stoll as Mike Prince in Showtime’s Billions
But here’s what’s worse. Such a scene might have made a splash if Stanley Tucci hadn’t done THE EXACT SAME THING in Big Night (1996). The exact same thing (albeit with a frittata). No point in highlighting your originality if you just copied someone else.
So, aside from egg-based calamities, let’s go through the five things that went wrong in Season 5.
1 Mike Prince is pre-AI slop
Mike Prince (Corey Stoll) has to be the most infeasible character in the history of TV. Axe was obnoxious and ruthless. Chuck was pious and hypocritical. But at least they were trying to be interesting and credible.
Mike Prince was an AI character before AI was properly a thing, a soulless slop of opinions and postures none of which hung together into what could properly be called a human being. What was he? A good man ruined by money, or a money man ruined by good? We just didn’t care. Because he was mostly verbose, self-serving and tedious. And the man knew how to stretch a metaphor like exhausted taffy!
The overwrought scripts sounded human coming from the throaty depths of Axe and Chuck. Mike Prince was a chuntering dot matrix of a man.
And, of course, the fact that he effectively took over the Axe role (more later) condemned the series to a slow, deflating death. What was it with his runs for the presidency and his attempts to greenwash the world? Don’t get me started.
2 Covid beat the life out of Billions
Can’t be helped of course, but the lockdown scythed the series into two. The last pre-Covid episode was broadcast on 14 June, 2020, and the next on 5 September 2021, during which time Paul Giamatti had lost 15lbs, his beard, his presence and most of his menace.
Others wore masks making it an unpalatable reminder of those horrible days. Somewhere in the lockdown, the season – like the rest of the world – lost its mojo.
3. Damian Lewis and the immeasurable tragedy
This was truly dreadful for genuinely sad reasons. Damian Lewis was a semi-detached member of the cast for most of the second half of the season, purportedly in lockdown but in real life spending time with his luminous wife, actress Helen McCrory who was known for her witchy work in Peaky Blinders.
She died from breast cancer in April 2021 and his absence is understandable. Shame though, for reasons far bigger than TV.
4. Love and hate and round again
We had become used to people switching sides. Everybody was allied to everyone else at some point for the purposes of ramping up the skulduggery. You needed plenty of red wool and a pinboard to keep track on which side Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon) was on at any given moment. And we loved – loved – when Axe and Chuck tag-teamed an assault on a hapless third party.
We could forgive all this swapping of sides – money being the one true god – but we drew the line when Charles Rhoades Snr, his son’s greatest champion, turned against his offspring and became BFFs with Axe after some ridiculous fol-de-rol with a kidney. Wrap it up, guys. We’re done. The lions are lying down with the lambs and so forth.
5. Scraping the barrel for plot twists
We had swallowed without much complaint. The idea that strictly moral good guy Bryan Connerty (Toby Leonard Moore) had become so obsessed nailing his former mentor Chuck that he engaged in some bonkers recreational safe-breaking.
But the idea that Chuck would do the exact same thing with the exact same safe breaker (Connerty’s own brother!) was a signal that plot barrels were being scraped for a sticky residue to sell as ice cream. And then there was Prince (see above) and Scooter, an exact replica of a relationship for Axe and Wags (the inestimable David Costabile).
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This is a gag used by films like Shaun of the Dead and Family Guy when the main characters meet their equivalents, doppelgangers living in some cheap Russian knock-off. But in Billions, it played out at length. Wags and Scooter trying to occupy the same space in the same timeline was in defiance of the laws of physics.
However, that was in Season 6 which was so beset with problems that the Gestalt Scooter-Wags Beast was the least of it. Indeed Season 6 took all the worst parts of the troubled Season 5 and doubled down in a manner that almost erased the fun of Seasons 1-4.
A bonus Billions hate
This extra hate deserves a whole section to itself, but I’m bound by my 5-from-5 promise. But, the Tanner artist-in-residence sub plot? What was that about? The big-necked splatter king locked up in a tower till he produced a masterpiece. Preposterous Pollocks.
Least that hollow plotline was spotted in real time. Screech of brakes and out of nowhere, he wasn’t there to incubate art. No, suddenly he was there because of some elaborate plot by Axe to – whatever – tempt Wendy Rhoades into bed? So that Axe would be driven to jealousy and finally forced to admit his feelings for the frosty Freud droid? Something like that.
And, again, FWIW, the late blossoming, no-touchee romance between Wendy and Axe was a low point sans pareil. (See also the mismatched Josh and Donna.) If it didn’t arise organically in the early seasons, take the hint guys. Stick it in the friend zone and close the door.