Billions, the Showtime drama that is streaming on Hotstar, rides on the success of films such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Big Short (2015), which attempt to explain the origins of turmoil on Wall Street and the broader financial world. Like them, the show ends up being unsure where its loyalties lie: decrying the sins of the Masters of the Universe or celebrating the raucous successes that precipitated the collapse.
Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis) is a hedge fund manager, the only partner of his firm to have survived the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. From humble beginnings, he is now a folk hero on Wall Street, not just for his ability to call the best trades but for his humanitarian projects, which include sending the kids of his deceased partners to Ivy League colleges and making donations to the fire department.
Up against Bobby is Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who is tasked with prosecuting financial crime and frauds, malfeasance that his jurisdiction seems to have no paucity of. In particular, Chuck has a beef with Wall Street types who rely on privileged information to bump up stocks and make a killing.
Billions uncovers the shenanigans of these two men as they play cat and mouse. To complicate matters, Chuck’s wife Wendy (Maggie Siff) works as a life coach at Bobby’s firm, rousing depressed hedge fund managers to listen to their inner alpha and go beat the competition.
The show purports to give the viewer an inside-look at the malaise on Wall Street, but is instead little more than a chronicle of the tricks that its protagonists muster in their desire for one-upmanship. When Chuck receives a tip on an insider deal that has benefitted Bobby, he desists from initiating an investigation. That must wait till Bobby purchases an $83 million beachfront property. Timing is everything, he tells an associate, which in Bobby’s case translates to an ostentatious display of his ill-gotten wealth.
Meanwhile, Wendy’s position creates troubles in both households – she makes many times more than her husband and is fiercely loyal to her job and her boss. This causes no small quantum of difficulty for Bobby with his wife, whose Irish ancestry is alluded to for the express purpose of signaling her ruthlessness.
Yet, for all its narrative hijinks, Billions paints with such broad brush strokes that every conceivable emotion, from jealousy to rage, affection to kindness, is the outcome of deliberation. Strategy is everything. When there is doubt, it is nearly always about form, not content. Do financial whizkids really have no inner lives?
The 2008 crisis introduced us to unheard-of financial skullduggery, and the films and television series based on it have aptly captured this aspect. But they have been less successful in enlightening us on the motivations of those who manufactured the crisis. We are told, ad nauseum, that greed is a powerful motivator, but surely, even to those at the top of the income pyramid, gentler emotions are not total strangers. Alas, Billions does not leave us any wiser.
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