Showtime’s Billions as space opera

Try imagining Showtime’s Wall Street cops ‘n’ robbers series Billions as a sci-fi adventure we’ll call Star Trek Voyeurs: The Far Frontiers of Finance.

Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) captains ‘robber’ Starship Axe Capital in Billions.

Hedge fund maven Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) captains Starship Axe Capital, his clinically pristine, all-glass mothership crewed by mutant humanoids and androids of the species Homo pecuniarius with an BDSM dominatrix (Maggie Siff) as morale officer. Axe’s merry band of cosmic traders and others in a starfleet federation of hedge funds probe financial deep space and legal black holes for personal wealth beyond anyone’s wildest dreams—billions!

Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) leading the ‘cops’ SDNY in Billions.

Yet in a not-so-far-off corner of the same universe lurks the righteous and warlike species Homo foederatus. Led by the dyspeptic Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) with a velvet fist in a Teflon glove, this litigious species is comprised of ever-scheming career mutants and just-plain-joes in rack suits who populate the Police Plaza asteroid, part of a Federal Galaxy ruled by a Darth Vader figure called ‘General’.

Clancy Brown as ‘The General’ in Billions.

The facts, unfortunately, are more prosaic.

Wall Street and the Office of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) is the American League East of US finance and law professionals. Billions’s principals and several of its less-hinged characters may be how some financiers and government lawyers fancy themselves. But having covered this world and its activities as a reporter, we found Billions characters, plots and story lines to get more far-fetched with each of the first three seasons.

Billions showrunners may have pitched the series as The Sopranos meets Wall Street. But ninety-nine-and-nine-tenths percent of what the characters in Billions do is office work. Even though a lot of designer luggage filled with bundles of $100 bills gets moved around, the nerdy, one-dimensional nature of people self-involved in the mathematics of high finance on the one hand and lawyers’ office politics on the other is a lot less colorful as drama than psychotic middle-aged, blue collar Italian-American males with cute nicknames who meet in a deluxe titty bar to josh each other and divvy kickback money and plot who to extort and whack next.

John Malkovich as Russian kleptarch Grigor Andolov in Billions.

This is no reflection on the actors’ fine work in Billions’s cast of stinkers & nasties, not least of whose task is retailing enough pop culture, movie and television references to make even Quentin Tarantino’s head spin. John Malkovich does his Malkovich thing as a Russian kleptarch: the showrunners missed primo pop-ref opportunities by not naming his character Boris Badenov and casting Cameron Diaz as Natasha Fatale. The best of the worst may be Charles ‘Dad’ Rhoades (Jeffrey DeMunn), father of Chuck (Giamatti), the US Attorney for the SDNY. Dad is a fiendishly foolish and entirely unsympathetic entitled old bantam rooster, and DeMunn swings this role with real aplomb.

Paul Giamatti and Jeffrey DeMunn as Chuck and Charles Rhoades in Billions.

The challenge at the heart of this show may be making viewers care about characters whose lives center on their work. The Sopranos is about family. Its devoted following and longevity comes from its characters’ relationships with each other. It may be a pleasure and privilege for the men to be mobsters, but that’s just work: the show draws us in because it tells stories about these people’s relationships, centering on the marital relationship between Tony and Carmela Soprano.

Maggie Siff’s Wendy Rhoades makes for the narrative fulcrum in Billions.

Both the cops and robbers in Billions feature a potpourri of personalities, similar to the various Star Trek franchises’ dysfunctional families, which reflect the typical contemporary American workplace. There are ‘families’, but no one really has a life outside of work. Rhoades’s wife Wendy (Siff) is the narrative fulcrum because she in effect ‘marries’ the work environments of her husband’s cops and her employer’s robbers.

Asia Kate Dillon as wunderkind Taylor Mason in Billions.

Thus it is fitting that the most compelling character to emerge is the one most dedicated and best at their work. Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon) presents as nonbinary, goes by third person plural pronouns, and lives the math in a world in which nearly everyone else ‘does’ it. Taylor appears to employ coming off as a sci-fi android as their magician’s white glove. They are smart, but young; and they have an ethical and emotional core that may end up being their Achilles heel—a mythical story to which Taylor refers in season three: ‘His mother had to hold him somewhere to dip him,’ they said.

Aboard the Starship Axe Capital in Showtime’s Billions.