Showtime’s ‘Billions’ is Hard to Believe

-By Gary Krasner

Hey, maybe I can help resolve the issue with this article: “Actor or actress? Billions star Asia Kate Dillon on how non-binary people fit into the Emmys.”

If you got a penis, or something other than a gap, then you’re a man. Otherwise, you’re a woman!

But then I’m just a simple old fart with a simple mind.

I will not refer to a gender confused person as “them” or “they.” I may be politically incorrect, but I won’t be grammatically incorrect.

Just like dick or no dick, a person is either singular or plural (def: Composed of more than one member, set, or kind). But even that is a minor matter with this series.

I started watching Billions (Showtime) last week, and it felt like I was watching the old “The West Wing” series w Martin Sheen and all those commie actors.

In Billions, the rich (assumed to be Republicans) are demonized and everyone else (self-proclaimed Democrats) are the good guys, speechifying incessantly and virtue signaling ad nauseum.

And when I say everyone else, I mean ALL THE GUEST STARS as well. I never saw so many recycled liberal actors from left wing TV and movie dramas.

So many of them! The who’s who of liberal Hollywood. The only one missing Ed Asner (I think because he’s dead?)

By episode 4, I noticed this was an Aaron Sorkin show. That’s when all this liberal preening made sense to me. But not the plot. The main protagonist (Paul Giamatti) is the US Attorney for the Southern District.

He’s a potential candidate for Governor and well-respected and feared. Oh, and he happens to be a masochist, married to a dominatrix, who occasionally visits a sex club in midtown to get his ass whipped and stepped on. I guess Sorkin felt that his secret sex life wouldn’t sink his career and hopes for higher office if it got exposed! Yeah, I can believe that.

If that’s unbelievable, how about the antagonist to Giamatti, multi billionaire Bobby Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis. He’s devoted to his wife. Is that believable? Wait. Let me draw the full picture.

He’s made hundreds of billions. Mansions across the country. And he married a street girl from Queens. And he turns down every opportunity to bang worldly and beautiful women.

And he is so devoted to her that the first lie he ever told her, and she discovers it, SHE walks out on HIM. And HE is going crazy being without her. Almost goes insane. One of the richest and powerful men in the world, pussy whipped by his wife.

Other than suspending disbelief on that and more, you have to sit through dialog you don’t understand—–either because it’s too Wall Street technical, or because the actors cannot properly articulate Sorkins self-indulgent liberal dialogs.

Exactly what I remember from the West Wing series. I could not, if my life depended on it, decipher what came out of the mouth of actor Dulé Hill — Martin Sheen’s (condescendingly cast) black personal aid.

And that’s the last incredulous thing I’ll mention. If this series reflects reality, and there are that many blacks working in the high echelons of finance and the legal profession that I see in Sorkin’s Showtime fable, then we finally have racial equality!

Liberals had The West Wing to relieve them of the reality of President Bush. Billions is an escape from the reality of Trump. But elements in Billions are less credible than a story about Donald Trump as President.


Copyright Publius Forum 2001