Wealth and power are such pervasive and serious shapers of American life that you can only admire the Showtime series Billions for having so much fun with both.
Billions, which returns Sunday at 9 p.m. ET for its 12-episode fourth season, started with the quest of U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti, top) to nail shady ultra-rich hedge fund manager Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis, top).
It soon became clear that very little about either character, or any character, was what it might have seemed. So instead of becoming a sober, intense drama about the nature of government and capitalism, Billions became a bemused, intense drama that in some ways reinforces our worst fears about how things work and in other ways reminds us that people with wealth and power are not a different species.
They’re just, to further mangle an apocryphal line, richer and more powerful.
Accordingly, Billions has plunged into soapy, melodramatic plotlines then redeemed itself by handling them with wit and charm.
As we rejoin the story for Season 4, Chuck is no longer U.S. attorney. He was fired and replaced by his former assistant, Bryan Connerty (Toby Leonard Moore), which Chuck assesses as a Boy Scout meeting the Peter Principle.
Chuck is now back working for his father, power broker Charles Sr. (Jeffrey DeMunn), who takes Chuck’s firing personally and mostly blames Chuck for it.
Axe has a problem of his own.
He hired the brilliant Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon, above) as his chief information officer, on the assumption she was as ruthless as he.
Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn’t. Either way, they had an unamicable parting and Taylor started a rival hedge fund, thanks to the patronage of billionaire Russian oligarch Grigor Andolov (John Malkovich).
Meanwhile, Chuck and Axe had gradually come to realize they have more in common, or at least more interests in common, than either originally thought. So they’ve become sort of comrades, if not pals, which among other things has made life a little easier for Chuck’s wife Wendy (Maggie Siff), whose day job is being one of Axe’s most trusted assistants.
The assistant at the heart of the new season’s first drama, though, is Wags Wagner (David Costabile, below), Axe’s COO. Wags checks the amorality box and takes it a few steps further than Axe himself. As the new season opens, Wags’ propensity for extracurricular pleasure sets up an awkward situation that threatens to complicate Axe’s determination to crush Taylor.
The plot twists that fuel that particular storyline sometimes stretch credibility, but here again, they’re handled in such a breezy manner that viewers don’t have to sit around getting depressed over the way the real-life rich and powerful live in a privileged world untroubled by rules the rest of us must follow.
The flat-out comic tour de force of the season’s opening episode comes from Chuck, who must adjust to his new civilian role while retaining enough juice so he can stay in the game.
Billions dramatizes this new world by sending him on a subtly hilarious quest that involves – no spoiler here – a piece of paper.
Billions does have its troubling side because the people in Axe’s and Chuck’s world do indeed have a sense of entitlement and often no concern for anything beyond their own pleasure and advancement. They also seem to face relatively few checks on their most self-serving impulses.
We can enjoy them, however, as folks who routinely drop wisecracks about popular culture – you wouldn’t guess who Andolov references – and spend less time luxuriating in their wealth and power than scrambling to maintain it.
When a show gets to Season 4, and it’s still fun, it’s doing something right.