A tale of two villains: Finance and the State in the TV Series Billions

Abstract

Finance has always been depicted as capitalism bad boy. From Gordon Gekko in Wall Street to the heartless brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke in Trading Places, people in finance have always been seen as ruthless individuals focusing on conspiring by thrashing jobs, lives and dreams in order to pile the cash needed to feed their ego. The tv series "Billions" seems to make no exception. Bobby Axelrod is an incredibly talented fund manager who has arisen from poverty only to prove himself the smartest guy in the room, bending laws, rules and norms to gain formidable profits from buying and selling shares and Financial assets. On his road firmly stood Chuck Rhoades, the heir of a wealthy American family who is a talented prosecutor with a brilliant political career prospect. Is it another tale of the savage capitalism constrained by the mighty and righteous state? It seems so after the first episodes, but then individuality kicks in, and the border between right and wrong, between just and unjust, between lawful and unlawful blurs until finance and capitalism are no more the obvious and despicable villains in the story. In that sense, Billions can be considered a different story on finance and the relationship between the state and capitalism. The viewer is forced to think better and harder before taking side against one of the two main characters representing what seems an eternal struggle between the financiers and the state. Maybe the final message is gloomier. The TV series authors do not redeem finance or capitalism by showing how wealth creation and destruction could bring society prosperity in the long run. They lower the standard of the state by showing how individuals' motivations and incentives could change the institutions' actions and scopes until they become no different from their enemies like financiers and entrepreneurs. If this is the only possible path for redemption for finance and capitalism in filmmaking, we cannot cheer up.