Billions is a show that has been raved about by many friends of mine as well as by quite a few people on Twitter, so it was only a matter of time before I found myself with little else to watch and dove into it. I finished up Season One last week and felt compelled to write something on this site for the first time in months. That's not necessarily because my review of the show is glowing; it's a show with a lot of strengths and a lot of problems.
First, let's start off with the good. The show's three leads are portrayed by Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, and Maggie Siff, and all three are fantastic. Giamatti in particular does great work with his voice, as his mannerisms and inflections are infectious. For lack of a better comparison, he's a poor man's Dark-Knight-Joker in that regard. Giamatti plays Chuck Rhoades, a U.S. District Attorney with an incredible 81-0 track record for putting away white collar criminals. He has his heart set on putting hedge fund kingpin Bobby Axelrod (Lewis) behind bars for insider trading, despite Axelrod's status as a beloved public figure for his philanthropy. Once Axelrod ("Axe") makes a PR slip-up, Chuck sees his chance to start an investigation against Axe that the public won't hate. That's complicated, because his wife Wendy (Siff) is also a psychologist and a prominent advisor of sorts to Axe at the latter's firm, Axe Capital.
The plot of the first season largely revolves around a chess match between Chuck and Axe as each tries to stay one step ahead of the other throughout the investigation. As one might expect, Wendy gets caught in the middle of that and is often cited as a potential conflict of interest for Chuck. Despite her insistence that she's not merely a go-between for the two male leads, that's frequently the situation in which she finds herself, particularly due to her close personal relationship with Axe. From a plot standpoint, the show is pretty engaging. I'd compare the plot devices as similar to (but better than) those used in House of Cards. While those in the know will be skeptical that any comparison I make to House of Cards resembles a compliment, that was actually one thing that House of Cards did quite well.
What makes the show less engaging than it could be is its narrow focus and generally weak characters. One watches Season One with the sense that Chuck can't ever really succeed in locking up Bobby, because without the central pissing match between two men with crazy egos, there's not much else going on. Other people are introduced throughout the season and don't resemble fleshed out characters as much as accessories to the ongoing spat between Axe and Rhoades. Chuck can't put Bobby in jail, because that would simply end the show. Therefore, when Bobby is on the ropes, it's not a question of if he'll wiggle out of trouble, but how. Similarly, Bobby can't get cleared of wrongdoing. This drastically lowers the stakes of the conflict.
Another issue is that Rhoades is a thoroughly detestable man. Sure, he's on the right side of the law, but he's such a fanatic for it that he's merciless (in a bad way) and tries to attain his own ends via truly horrible means. He's actually eerily similar to another Chuck -- Chuck McGill from Better Call Saul. However, where Saul puts a great deal of effort into developing Chuck McGill's backstory and gives us a lot of subtle character moments that make his story compelling, we really have no idea why Rhoades is such a prick. In one episode, he gets pissed at a guy on the street who doesn't pick up his dog's shit, so he bullies the guy into picking it up with his bare hands. It was a little funny, but the show does nothing to help us understand what motivates Rhoades to perform such random acts of assholery. It's remarkable that despite how well Giamatti plays Rhoades, the character still winds up one-dimensional and boring -- a pretty big failure on the part of the writers. His wife Wendy is similarly problematic -- we don't get to understand much of her besides her relationship to Axe and that she's an awesome psychologist. We probably learned more about the Chuck/Wendy marriage from one pretty great scene between Chuck and a dominatrix in a whore house than a full season's worth of their actual interaction.
Axe gets fleshed out far better, as we see what he's like outside of his professional capacity. At his job, I liken Axe to Suits' Harvey Specter in that he wins with gimmick-like frequency and his success earns him absurd lifestyle perks. However, in addition to Axe the investment world demigod, we also see Axe the father, Axe the husband, and Axe the friend. Despite being a criminal, Axe can be a good person sometimes and Rhoades being human garbage often makes Axe the more sympathetic figure in the central conflict. Without spoiling too much, though, he does pretty terrible things to some people around him besides trade on insider information. The writers deserve credit for giving Axe the depth the character deserves; it's just that some of his actions make him tough to root for. We watch these men claw at each other tooth and nail for twelve episodes while sort of wanting both to fail.
As mentioned above, the auxiliary characters are on the whole pretty bad. Wags, Bobby's COO, is an uninteresting ass-kissing drone who's mostly on screen to be mean to the employees, though he's genuinely funny when he cracks wise. Lara, Bobby's wife, is a little more interesting, particularly later in the season when she encounters adversity (the ruthless, intimidating, wolf-in-sheep's-clothing act wears thin pretty quick). Most of Bobby's employees might as well be the same person and the one who actually has some depth, Donnie, is ultimately just a tool used by Bobby and the show's writers (...to further develop Bobby). Rhoades' underlings are no better; I thought it was super cute that the show was trying to get us to care about a budding relationship between Connerty and Kate, two people who couldn't be more nondescript through this first season.
All that being said, Billions has proven to be clever enough at times that I'm going to stick with it for now. The action in the season's final episodes was very engrossing and they've laid enough groundwork with the characters to hopefully make the supporting cast more interesting going forward. I'm skeptical they're going to start treating all of these people like they're people and not plot tools. But for the time being, I'll just enjoy Giamatti's intensely-voiced analogy-laden monologues and Axe's frequent moments of badassery.
Season Grade: B-
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