Showtime’s Billions: Greed Is Gripping

You can almost picture the pitch meeting between the creators of the Wall Street legal drama Billions and a team of suits at Showtime. It’s a show about a hedge fund manager, the producers would have said, and a suspicious pharmaceutical trade. And a bunch of securities fraud investigators. The cable television executives would have shuddered at the words “hedge fund,” a term that few New Yorkers even understand, let alone those outside the financial capital. And it only gets worse from there.

Hollywood has long considered the financial world to be fatally boring—which, considering the vast sums of money, drama, and corruption coursing through it, represents a major creative failing. With the movies The Wolf of Wall Street, Margin Call, and The Big Short, and now the series Billions, premiering Jan. 17, the entertainment industry looks to finish the job. But if anything, it undersells how insane things can really get.