I turned off “Billions” a minute after its opening scene of a bound, chained and muffled Paul Giamatti engaged in some S & M sex. My beef is not with what consenting adults do to each other in the game of arousal – it’s that since I don’t consider victimless perversions any of my business, I similarly choose not to watch or be implicated in them. I subsequently heard that the episode which involved burning and urination turned out to be between husband and wife. Instead of softening my reaction, this reinforced my resistance to being a voyeur of other people’s masochistic fantasies. Though the creators of Billions beg the issue of pushing boundaries between porn and regular tv by making the participants a happily married couple, the viewer is the one being exploited. This belief was sustained after watching the second episode of Billions in which all the characters – male and female – sprinkle their dialogue with heavy doses of language similar to the gangsters on The Sopranos.
Just as men have been convinced by fashion to sport the unshaved, grizzled look for the past few years, writers have succumbed to the notion that it enhances the macho quality of their highly educated characters to hyphenate all their words with the F word. So we have the US attorney and of his female associate speaking the same way that uneducated and inarticulate characters do. There are no longer distinctions in language that would normally signify differences in class, education, gender and profession. Watching Billions, I thought of the difference between programming for PBS and for cable channels and the duplicity of pretending that what is being shown on Showtime is simply a reflection of reality. In the name of nostalgie de la boue, there is a conscious effort to degrade the more educated proponents of lawful society so that their behavior becomes no different from the criminal element. In some ways, this is the reverse of what David Chase did in The Sopranos where murderous criminals lived upper-class lifestyles – decorating their Mcmansions, consulting psychiatrists and concerning themselves with getting their children into Ivy League schools. This was a clever way of appealing to the target audience that would pay for a premium cable channel and remain interested in the affairs of organized crime.