BILLIONS: Sunday 10PM on Showtime
The second season of Showtime’s financial intrigue soap BILLIONS isn’t in a tremendous hurry to get started. The story picks up a few weeks after the Season 1 finale, enough time for billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) to fix up the offices he’d ripped apart after US Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) had taunted him with intimations of hidden surveillance equipment. Bobby and Chuck are still seething at each other, and the woman in the middle, Chuck’s wife and Bobby’s employee Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff) has essentially divorced herself from both of them, quitting her job and her marriage (although she and Chuck are trying to keep their split civilized, alternating custody of their Manhattan townhouse).
The season’s opening hour, written by series co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and directed by Reed Morano, breaks little new ground. An Internal Affairs investigator is introduced to dig into Chuck’s activities–and indirectly, those of his wife–while Chuck and Bobby obsess about each other (and Wendy), scheme and pontificate. As rigorously opposed as the two men are, they share a weakness for what The Incredibles called monologuing, imparting at length to whomever happens to be with them about the lessons they’ve learned in life, and the ways in which they’re going to rip out each other’s figurative (maybe) throats. With little fresh action in the episode (apart from the IA investigator, there’s a new trans intern at Bobby’s firm, introduced with enough prominence to suggest a continuing presence), those displays of verbal machismo feel particularly wearisome.
Billions improved over the course of its first season, sharpening its plotting and delving into its characters, and by the season’s end, it seemed like it might be just a touch or two away from being really superior television. The hope was that Season 2 would accelerate that process, after the creative personnel were given the chance to absorb the lessons of the first outing, but at least in the early going, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The protagonists are instead familiarly one-note. Even Bobby’s wife Lara (Malin Akerman) is once again practicing her own displays of ruthlessness. (We are, however, spared further details about Chuck’s S&M tastes, at least for the moment.)
Billions remains worthwhile for its bravura acting, especially by Siff, who has the benefit of the show’s only genuinely layered character. Koppelman and Levien also pack their Mamet-lite dialogue with plenty of savage one-upmanship to keep things rolling. Billions is going to start exhausting its line of credit, though, if it doesn’t start to provide variations on its themes. Long-running TV series, like maturing corporations, need to diversify.
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