Billions

I am no where far into the series to develop an in-depth opinion of the shoe but I think that I like what I see so far. 

I did a search a few months ago on some must watch shows for those who want to understand 2008, 1989 and the 1930s Great Depression. The shows below made an appearance. 

Most of my thinking about movies and learning comes from a time I spent as part of the comms team for a mental health NGO in Uganda and part of our assignment was to review films that explored the subject of mental health and offered some insights into the same. I supposed as a result of that experience I have consequently developed a love for film and its capacity to shed light on different complex subjects. 

Billions therefore falls in this category of must watch series. It is a story about a wealthy young man who is and has made a healthy chunk of change from the. Markets and who is as things seem likely to continue making a lot more at least as long as he can wiggle his way around an attorney who is bent on bringing him down. 

The attorney has a story of his own and does his smart and kinky wife. This reminds me of another show that deals with the incredibly valuable and talented people in our lives who have strange sexual habits but who on the surface function at a rather effective level. 

Just two episodes into the show and there are a few scenes worth mentioning. The first is a relationship with the past. The show makes great effort to help us understand just how Important and sentimental wealthy people are and how these old relationships inform how they invest. There is a pizza shop that is about to close but the protagonist will have nothing of it. It has the best pizza in his city. Besides the owner of the shop was nice to him when he was a nosy kid struggling to find a safe place in the city. 

The second is an experience he had with a man and family for which he was a caddy during a rough patch in his life. The family for which he served fires him in an unfair incident and this experience stays with him. As fate would have it, he comes into a part of the city where a building bears the name of the infamous man that fired him from his low paying golf job. He decides to change the name replacing it with his own. It will cost the desperate family but instead of offering the full amount he offers them the same figure that he was paid…except of course a much lower offer than initially agreed. Then there is a lesson about why you should not mess with the wives of influential men. I think this part mirrors an episode of House of Cards in which the Vice President’s Wife, herself a tour de force takes on a staff member who decides to take her to court. In Billions though, it is an issue of respect and a threat that the Billionaire’s wife makes quite publicly to the hitherto clueless former friend. She find herself expelled from all her clubs and humiliated and her son barred from getting into an Ivy League university. 

The rest of the show is a conversation or a back and forth between the two major players as they eat away at their enemies one close friend at a time, often getting personal and involving unfaithful fathers.