‘Billions’ review: Testosterone, money and one-per-center woes

Embedded firmly in the entertainment landscape where TV drama is the new film, attracting big names and bigger budgets, is Billions (Sky Atlantic, Thursday). The glossy new Showtime drama stars Damian Lewis as a bajillionaire hedge-fund whiz, Bobby Axelrod – his Homeland-honed American accent is impeccable – and Paul Giamatti as a New York attorney determined to bring him down. By the end of episode one we know that their battle is going to be as sweaty and macho as anything in Game of Thrones.

Axe – of course that's his nickname – is slick and attractive, usually to be found in gleaming offices filled with challenging art. His adversary, Giamatti's Chuck Rhoades, is bald and bearded, in dreary wood-panelled rooms – there's not much subtlety in Billions. Chuck, though, is also a one-per-center; his father is wealthy, making his son's choice to become a public servant more admirable.

Testosterone blasts from the TV in great gagging sprays as the traders banter in a script that crackles with energy (and casual sexism) but has bouts of financial jargon as impenetrable as it is boring. And because this is made for US cable TV, where sex is full on and full frontal, the opening shot of Billions is highly charged and randomly rude: Chuck enjoying an S&M session.

What their spouses do should be more interesting. Chuck’s wife, Wendy (Maggie Siff), is (improbably) the in-house psychologist at Axe’s company. Axe’s wife, Lara (Malin Akerman), looks the part of a charity-circuit socialite but is, as she says, from a big Irish family and knows how to fight dirty.

Because these hyped dramas (notably Fargo and True Detective) are big-buck, cinematic productions we tend to expect them to carry a serious or even deep message. Not Billions. It's a compelling, high-octane power-and-privilege romp – essentially Gordon Gecko updated. Watch episode one and you'll want to watch them all.

Foam, as those of us who have watched too many episodes of Masterchef know, is posh, a fizzy last-minute addition to a plate for a culinary reason that I can't quite fathom other than that it's fashionable. Styrofoam, on the other hand, is not posh and is never usually mentioned as a cake ingredient, but here it is in the new personal-finance series My Money & Me (RTÉ One, Wednesday), and it's a top money-saving tip. Canny couples who want the flash but not the cost of a multitier wedding cake can apparently get their baker to ice a Styrofoam tier – and Bob's your uncle: no one will ever guess. (Unless a tired and emotional Uncle Bob tries to take a bite out of it at the end of night.)

This six-part consumer-affairs series isn’t so much concerned with tips. It’s more the bigger picture, so a case study takes up most of the programme. This week it’s the personal finances of a young Dublin couple, Lorna and Keith. They’re deep in negative equity on their 100-per-cent-mortgage, boom-time Roscommon house. They rent it out now, as a job offer brought them back to Dublin.

It's a story that will resonate with many viewers, but theirs is a problem that no half-hour programme, with its standard personal finance advice of "keep a note of everything you spend", could possibly solve. Spreadsheets aren't exactly TV gold, so My Money & Me takes the police-procedural approach: its very serious presenters, Kathriona Devereux and Sinead Ryan, write notes and pin photographs on one of those giant clear noticeboards you see on CSI, which is a bit subliminally judgy for a personal-finance programme.

More interesting is the science bit, with an item where Pete Lunn, a behavioural economist, shows with a simple experiment how consumers can easily be codded into spending more than they intended to if the shop manages to plant notion in their heads. It’s eerily easy to fool the public.

Documentaries dealing with the legacy of a prominent and good person tend to leave a warm glow. They’re like obituaries come to life, concerned not just with a life well lived but with what the person has left behind. There’s a satisfaction in watching and admiring that, even if the person’s death was too early, and a criminal tragedy.

In Veronica Guerin: A Legacy (RTÉ One, Monday) we see that the Dublin crime journalist lived every minute of her life to the full, on her own terms, with good friends and colleagues, and a loving husband and young son.

The interviews are warm and intimate and paint a picture of a tenacious, fearless journalist. Guerin loved her job, breaking big stories, fearlessly doorstepping drug kingpins and writing about them, revealing their great wealth and flashy lifestyles to an astonished public.

Before she was murdered in broad daylight, 20 years ago, Guerin had already been wounded in a shooting. Her home had been shot at, and she had been assaulted by the drug dealer John Gilligan. She well knew that, as her friend the broadcaster Matt Cooper says, businessmen might sue you but “when you’re dealing with criminals they’re going to hurt you”.

All this is vividly covered. But in tone and style A Legacy is an intimate portrayal, starting and ending with Guerin's husband, Graham, and son talking about her as a wife and mother.

The murder of Guerin revealed a criminal underworld that considered itself untouchable, and it prompted a shamed government to act by pushing through emergency legislation that led to the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau. That’s a powerful, clearly defined legacy.

In her career sniffing out stories, Guerin, an accountant’s daughter, began with the follow-the-money principal. So an organisation with the power to seize suspected ill-gotten gains should have provided that warm-glow ending to the film.

But the director Sharon Dalton’s exploration of Guerin’s legacy goes further, and the glow quickly dims. News footage of recent drug-gang killings on the streets of Dublin is shown. “We had all these promises from the ministers at the time, and it was all going to be done and dusted,” says Graham. “Twenty years down the road we are back to stage one.”

tvreview@irishtimes.com