“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S.Lewis could have been pitching my new favorite show when he said that.
Billions is a brilliant illustration of the danger Lewis was warning against.
The title refers to one of the main characters who is a billionaire hedge fund manager. Bobby Axelrod is played by Damian Lewis, whom I’ve loved since he played Col. Winters in Band of Brothers. (The rest of the country loved him in Homeland but that show just irritated me.) In this, he plays the sole survivor of a company whose personnel was wiped out on 9/11. Now he runs the most successful investment house in New York.
Can he possibly be so successful without breaking the law?
The US attorney, Chuck Rhoades, doesn’t think so.
Rhoades is played by Paul Giamatti and who doesn’t love Paul Giamatti?? Has he ever been bad in anything?
He’s certainly not bad in this.
So the set-up is that the US Attorney is determined to bring action against the hedge fund King/Man of the People/Philanthropist Bobby Axelrod, who he is SURE is guilty of insider trading. His evidence? Um…he…bought a really big house. Oh, come on; no one gets that rich and successful playing by the rules!
OH, to make things far more interesting, Axe has an in-house psychotherapist whose job is to keep all the traders sharp and on their games. Wendy’s really, really good at her job, which she describes as ‘creating assassins’. Oh, and she’s married to the US attorney, Chuck Rhoades. Conflict of interest, anyone? This element may be unrealistic but it ads a necessary dimension to the show: Wendy's sessions give the viewer insight to the characters we couldn't get any other way.
The whole season is a cat and mouse game between two alpha males (and two alpha females: Axe’s wife, Lara is no one you want to mess with, either) all of whom are a lot smarter than your average bear.
As a character study, it’s brilliant. While it’s revealed that Axe has indeed done things that can best be described as unsavory and we see plenty of hints that he may have crossed the line of legality, we see no overt criminality and tons of pure awesomeness. If I had billions, I hope I’d be as open handed, generous and dependable as Bobby Axelrod. Insider trading? Maybe. Probably. So what?
Then there’s Chuck. He’s so completely sure of his own righteousness, he uses, loses, abuses, lies to, breaks and tosses people aside in his single minded determination to take down Axe. For every million dollars Axe gives to the police federation, the fireman’s fund or the symphony, Chuck ruins someone in his pursuit of Axe.
Chuck is constantly making heroic, stirring speeches to his office about fighting the good fight, justice being on their side etc. etc. then he turns around and when no one is looking, commits crimes against decency and ethics so great that discovery would not only mean disbarment but prosecution. He’ll never stop: he has the approval of his own conscience. And its worse than that: he’s trying mightily to infect his entire office with his own corruption.
Oh, and while Axe and Lara are into reading Harry Potter to their sons and trying to ensure that they don’t grow up entitles brats, Chuck and Wendy are into S&M. Both men are devoted to their wives but since Chuck’s own relationship with his wife is so…alternate, he is incapable of believing that Wendy’s relationship with Axe is not more sinister than it seems. Chuck is so jealous of his wife’s relationship with Axe, it drives him crazy. Literally nuts. This is what drives Chuck’s determination to destroy Axe.
The more layers get peeled back, the denser and more convoluted the layers get.
I know from watching the bonus material that the creators of the show intend Axe to be the bad guy and Chuck the good guy but at the end of the first season, I’m 100% Team Axe. Even if he committed every crime Chuck imagines he did, it would pale in comparison to the egregious crimes against justice that Chuck encourages his office to commit every single day, while wearing a flag pin in his lapel.
In fact, Chuck Rhoades is the embodiment of why Conservatives want to allocate as little power as possible to the government: he has internalized the power of his office and like a sociopath, never questions his own motives. That self-blindness is the definition of utter corruption.
I loved it.