Official Billions Thread: Season 7 (Final Season), Episode 9 (10/6/23) - Game Theory Optimal

storm2006

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Watched the first two episodes of this and couldn't find a thread so I decided to create one. This show is entertaining and I know it will appeal to a lot of people on NT.

For those that have watched...Are you Team Axe or Team Rhoads?

I'll start it off with +1 for Team Axe :pimp: :pimp:

EDIT: Season 2 begins today ladies and gentlemen. Trailers have been posted below and Season 2 Episode 1 is up online already!

EDIT #2: Season 3 begins today folks. I posted a trailer, cast videos Season 1 and 2 Recap below to get your juices flowing.









 
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Yeah pretty entertaining. I feel like they're ******* with Axe just off how wealthy they are, nothing to really villainize him in the viewers eye. Saying people hate people who buy **** like that is a stretch , most understand wealthy folks buy expensive ****, and they have nothing on them. So for now, team Axe. Paul Giammatti doing his thing as usual though.
 
Trailer caught my attention, will have to check this out.

Major Winters in Band of Brothers > Damian Lewis the actor > Nicholas Brody in Homeland.
 
In. Caught ep 1 last night, was entertained. Team Dont Care right now. Wonder how they'll flesh out Bobby Axe and make him more interesting.
 
Just finished ep 1, definitely looking like a solid show. I'm sure they'll treat the characters with respect and open up more about them as the seasons go on...
 
I could imagine that a lot of the contingent that likes Suits (on USA) might like this show as well. I'm rooting for Axe in Billions but it feels wrong because he's basically a Harvey Specter villain :lol:
 
Don't have showtime, but managed to peep that freebie of EP. 1 on youtube.

Definitely has my attention.  Now I need to find a place on the net to let me 

watch the rest of the series. No way I'm adding showtime to the bill. 
 
Showtime says its new drama Billions snagged the best series debut performance ever for one of its original series: 2.99 million views to date. Billions was sampled early across platforms, delivering 1.6 million views prior to its Sunday night debut on the network – the most ever for a Showtime series. Then, on Sunday night, the Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis starrer delivered 1.4 million viewers on the network. Prior record holder Ray Donovan clocked 2.91 million views including linear premiere night and advance sampling on subscriber platforms in 2013.
 
Here are some quotes from Billions, Showtime's whip-'em-out-and-measure-'em new drama about a couple of jerks butting heads on the legal and political battlefield of the financial market:

"My cholesterol's high enough. Don't butter my ***."

"A good matador doesn't try to kill a fresh bull. You wait until he's been stuck a few times."

"My father always told me that 'mercy' was a word ******* used when they couldn't take the pain."

And that's just in the first 30 minutes of the pilot.

Billions is overloaded with this kind of dialogue — like someone loaded a bazooka with discarded material from Glenngarry Glen Ross and blasted it all over a stack of TV scripts. But while the series, like its protagonists, has all the trappings of greatness, it never goes deep enough to justify how impressed it is with itself.

Screenwriting gurus used to argue that the characters needed to be likable. A decade-plus of beloved antihero dramas — The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, et al. — has proven that advice limiting and stupid. But there is a general rule of drama that still holds: The characters have to be interesting.

Both of Billions' protagonists fail that test. In one corner, we have Bobby "Axe" Axelrod, a bootstraps-to-billionaire hedge fund manager played by Homeland alum Damian Lewis. Bobby, unlike many of his fellow Wall Street cronies, has managed to avoid widespread hatred by carefully modulating his own public image — a fact that sticks in the craw of his rival, U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades. Rhoades, played by Paul Giamatti, is utterly obsessed with taking Bobby down, for reasons Billions never quite manages to justify. Later episodes flesh out the allies and enemies on both sides.





What Billions lacks is a reason to care about any of this. In theory, there are billions of dollars on the line — not to mention the U.S. economy. In practice, the conflict in Billions essentially boils down to the needless war of egos between a couple of boring rich guys.

Lewis, at the very least, manages to find some shades to Bobby, humanizing him without downplaying the good and bad sides of his enormous ego. But Giamatti gives his strongest performances when he's asked to be quiet and subtle, and Billions mostly just gives him an endless array of grandiose speeches to sputter out.

In its sharper moments, Billions treats this macho posturing — which eventually trickles down to Bobby and Chuck's underlings — as a desperate performance. The characters repeatedly quote Goodfellas, in tacit acknowledgement that the ego-driven warfare of Wall Street isn't all that different than the ego-driven warfare of the mafia. And the sudsy nonsense of the overarching narrative becomes more interesting in the rare moments when one of the two protagonists is forced to confront the fragility of his own position.

There's a better and more interesting show hidden within Billions, and it emerges whenever Maggie Siff's Wendy takes the screen. Wendy is the sole character with a foot in both Bobby and Chuck's camps; she works as an in-house performance coach for the former, and is married to the latter. A TV show about the therapy-style sessions conducted by Wendy — the one time when these Masters of the Universe drop the act and express their own vulnerabilities — could be fascinating. But the show merely feints in that direction before getting back to its conference rooms and private jets.

The best thing I can say about Billions is that it improves. Showtime sent six episodes of Billions to critics for advance review — a full half of the show's first season — with an earnest request to watch them all before writing any kind of review. That's an unusually high number of episodes to judge, and it makes me suspect that Showtime knew the pilot was a dog. Later episodes revisit and recontextualize some of the pilot's more shallow flourishes. Take Chuck's predilection for kinky bondage play, which literally opens the series. In an attention-grabbing cold open, a dominatrix shoves a lit cigarette into his chest, before urinating upon him. In the context of that first episode, it's a premium cable stunt designed to shock the audience into attentiveness. But later episodes elaborate on Chuck's particular fetish — where it originates, how he indulges it, and how it fits into his marriage — in a way that feels surprisingly and refreshingly mature.

In theory, this is how every TV show works: You introduce a simple premise, then spend the following episodes expanding upon it, introducing new depth and new developments. At the half-season point, there's enough soap-opera intrigue to fuel a cottage industry of TV recaps. But while Billions is both glitzy and propulsive enough to sustain some attention, it's hard to argue that it's really worth the time. The best thing about the peak TV era is that there's a never-ending list of quality shows to watch. Is it really worth spending any time and thought on a show that hits the mark by aiming low?
 
^Don't care for that analysis and stopped reading :lol:

I watched the first ep and knew this show had potential. 2nd ep hasn't turned me off at all.

I find both main characters likeable in their own way. I find Attorney General Rhoades interesting. There's something there to his back story imo.

Axe is showing and proving so it's yet to be seen how interesting I'll find him.

They need to do something with Axe's wife. Ackerman I think her name is. The character aint doing much for me and I never thought much of the actresses but this is her chance to impress.

I'm already really in to Rhoades wife. I'm just waiting for Axe to smash and for when she gets mad and really starts manipulating both of them.

I feel like if you enjoyed The Big Short or Wolf of Wall St and found either interesting you'll like this and at least give S1 a try. So far this looks like a strong one for Showtime as they sort of raise up the ranks with re-upping their supply with good series while it's not clear that'll be done with HBO or AMC.
 
I'm a fan of Giamatti's work and this is no exception.

Agreed that there's more to his backstory and I'm also liking the buildup to different plotlines / characters.
 
Only caught the second ep now...

A cool ep. I like the fact that their opening up on Axe's wife too. I think she's going to be a crucial character as the season goes on. Building it up so that both of the wives are knee deep in it.

It's kinda :lol: how Axe is still holding grudges from years ago, and I like the way it builds up his character of consistently wanting to win at all costs, and get revenge on anyone who was in his way of his path to success.

It says quite a bit about his character...
 
Only caught the second ep now...

A cool ep. I like the fact that their opening up on Axe's wife too. I think she's going to be a crucial character as the season goes on. Building it up so that both of the wives are knee deep in it.

It's kinda :lol: how Axe is still holding grudges from years ago, and I like the way it builds up his character of consistently wanting to win at all costs, and get revenge on anyone who was in his way of his path to success.

It says quite a bit about his character...

I think a lot of wealthy individuals in real life are like Axe in terms of the vengeance. Can't wait for Episode 3
 
Yeah, there's the petty rich guys who are vengeful but then there's the guys who came from nothing and become wealthy and they go hard.
 
Only caught the second ep now...

A cool ep. I like the fact that their opening up on Axe's wife too. I think she's going to be a crucial character as the season goes on. Building it up so that both of the wives are knee deep in it.

It's kinda :lol: how Axe is still holding grudges from years ago, and I like the way it builds up his character of consistently wanting to win at all costs, and get revenge on anyone who was in his way of his path to success.

It says quite a bit about his character...

I think a lot of wealthy individuals in real life are like Axe in terms of the vengeance. Can't wait for Episode 3

Definitely, I'm not in finance at all, but a bunch of my boys are, and a lot of them came from nothing. A big part of their grind is just proving all those people wrong; all the broads that laughed at them, all the dudes that teased them, all the people who never believed in them.
 
so far so good. can't wait for episode 3. hope this doesn't wither like so many other shows that initially show promise.
 
Man this show is pure fire. 2nd episode was even better than the pilot. Think this will continue strong.

GREAT acting as well
 
Renewed for a second season on the 26th of January.
pimp.gif


I really like this show, the first 3 episodes have been solid.
 
I really liked that in this recent ep they gave Axe's wife a story line and made her useful and showed her motives so we can see more of her personality and show she's a down *** *****. Just a side of her protective side. I'd like to see when she's on the attack or maybe doing her own thing.

On the flip, Rhoades is ruthless and his wife shady too :lol: Making ppl pick up ****, manipulating ol girl to leave the company so Hardman (I'm calling him Hardman from Suits until I remember his name) wouldn't screw her over, leveraging dude's parents on him so he'd flip on Axe potentially, and then of course the weird sex near the end :lol: :smokin
 
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