There are few things on television I enjoy more than a good “Billions” fake-out. The sine qua non comes from the stellar Season 2 episode “Golden Frog Time,” in which a Chuck Rhoades who at first appears to be sobbing is actually laughing hysterically because his plan to undermine his enemy Bobby Axelrod worked like a charm. (At the expense of his best friend and his father, but still!)

The sleight-of-hand that occurs in this week’s episode isn’t nearly as momentous, but it provides that thrilling frisson nonetheless. For a moment, it looks as if Chuck has put the screws to Mike Prince’s alma mater, Indiana A&M, to prevent it from investing in his firm. How? By blackmailing the university’s endowment chair, Stuart Legere (Whit Stillman alum Chris Eigeman), who has been embezzling.

But it turns out that the opposite is true. Chuck is blackmailing Legere and the endowment into investing with Prince by threatening to expose the embezzlement. Having previously rejected his father for the role as too obvious a choice, Chuck wants an inside man who will report back on Prince’s every move, and now he has found one. The needle drop of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that accompanies the maneuver is no mere music cue. It’s a mission statement: No matter what Mike Prince does, the watchful eyes of Charles Rhoades Jr. will be on him, whether he knows it or not.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Six hundred dollars for coffee with Kate Sacker; $46,863 for Wendy Rhoades’s wardrobe; $162,500 for a night at a Covid-free bordello with Wags; $300 million for Mike Prince’s new yacht, plus an extra $300 million to neutralize its carbon footprint. We’ve said before in this space that the credo of the pro wrestler Ted DiBiase (a.k.a. the Million Dollar Man), “Everybody’s got a price,” holds sway in the world of “Billions.” Never before has the show made it quite this literal.

In one of the boldest stylistic choices ever made by the show — you could argue the boldest, and I wouldn’t object — this week’s episode of “Billions” repeatedly freezes the action and superimposes graphics that show you the cost of all the name brands, grand plans and illegal indulgences enjoyed by Michael Prince and his employees. Did you know that a private hog roast with the restaurateur Rodney Scott costs $25,000? That a batch of quaaludes and a courier to deliver them runs you $8,400? That multiple characters’ personal wardrobes and grooming routines on a given day cost more than this country’s yearly per capita income? You sure do now!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

“I look at every competitor as a potential partner … right up until I can’t anymore.” As far as one-sentence encapsulations of the Mike Prince Method go, it’s hard to beat this statement by the billionaire coprotagonist of the sixth season of “Billions.” In this week’s episode, titled “S.T.D.” (it’s not what you think), Prince drives one such competitor — one of the more odious figures in the “Billions” legendarium — to the edge of defeat, then rides in to save his bacon and enrich them both.

It’s a feat of bargaining so impressive that it literally drives Prince’s enemy Chuck Rhoades into the street, wielding a bullhorn instead of his authority as Attorney General. In the end, Chuck may find the former more effective than the latter.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

If you’re looking for the future of “Billions,” two quotes from this week’s episode point the way forward, I think. The first comes from Wendy Rhoades, describing to Taylor Mason her fear that their boss, Mike Prince, might suffer from narcissistic personality disorder: “He thinks he’s better than everyone else, and he won’t stop till he gets what he wants.”

The second comes from Chuck Rhoades, describing the method to his newfound rabble-rousing madness: “No one is safe.”

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Which brings us to the big question asked by the episode, and perhaps by the entire show: Is there such a thing as an ethical billionaire? “Billionaires break the laws of decency, even while obeying the letter,” says Chuck. “By definition, having that much is criminal.” Prince disagrees; he’s a billionaire himself, so what did you expect?

But as a character, he represents a unique challenge to Chuck Rhoades’s entire raison d’être: He believes that, even as a billionaire, he can effectively police himself and his peers on the Prince List in the bargain. Somehow I doubt that the newly minted torches-and-pitchforks Chuck will agree.

I’m covering Billions‘ sixth season for the New York Times, starting with my review of the season premiere. Always good to be back on this beat.

Prince sees himself as an ethical billionaire. Is there such a thing?

It’s an open question. There are billionaires who definitely do great things with their wealth, and their companies generate wealth for others, and they may be good people. I think the show is actually more interested in … There’s the cliché “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” The other side of that is what the great fortune does to that person — what the power and wealth and resources do to a person’s soul, for lack of a better word.

In terms of my own opinion of it, it takes a big leap for me to imagine having that kind of wealth and hoarding it, keeping it for myself and doing whatever I have to do to grow it. I find it very hard to put myself in the shoes of someone like that. I understand greed and covetousness as much as anybody, but on that scale, I find it really difficult to conceptualize what would keep you underpaying your workers when you already have tens of billions of dollars.

I interviewed actor Corey Stoll about his role as Mike Prince, Billions‘ new antagonist/co-protagonist, for the New York Times. This should be in the print edition too sometime soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

SPOILERS AHEAD

“So this is what it is to lose,” says Bobby Axelrod. “OK.”

He’s talking to Mike Prince, the man who helped engineer his downfall — a decisive one this time. How do we know it’s decisive? Because, I think, of that concluding “OK.” (Also, Damian Lewis, who plays Axe, just made public he is leaving the show.) Until this point, Axe has always scratched and clawed like a cornered animal to fight his way out of defeat, whether at the hands of his legal nemesis Chuck Rhoades or his business rivals, like Prince. This time, though? He admits he has been beaten, and makes his peace with it.

So why does it feel like a loss for Chuck, too?

I reviewed tonight’s big, big Billions season finale for the New York Times.

“As the series was coming together,” Costabile says, “[Koppelman and Levien] were reinventing an entire character, someone who was essential to the whole story.” Perhaps the single most recognizable symbol of that process was Costabile’s own contribution: Wags’s signature mustache.

“We originally said to him, ‘Maybe you shave your head,’” Koppelman recalls. “And he was like, ‘I will if you want, but let me show you another idea.’”

“I really pushed Brian and David to have the twisty mustache,” Costabile says. “I was like, ‘This should be who this person is. He knows what he’s doing. He knows that on some level, if you looked at him, you’d be like, Who is this guy with the twisty mustache? The guy who’s either pretending to be the devil or is the devil? What the fuck is going on? It seemed like such a fun chess move. He’s not somebody who pushes you off balance, he pulls you off balance, pulling you in in order for you to fall.”

“He showed up having organized that mustache,” Koppelman says, “with the wax and the upturn thing, and I remember we were just like, ‘Yep, that’s the guy. That’s Wags.’”

I spoke with the creators, cast, and actor David Costabile himself about the creation of Wags, Billions‘ best character, for Vulture. This piece was a long time in the making and I hope you enjoy it!

Watching “Billions” may be a breeze, but watching “Billions” to recap it is not. Constant pausing and rewinding is required to catch the countless twists and turns of every scheme; I would estimate that an hourlong episode takes me an hour and a half — at a minimum — to finish.

Nice work if you can get it, but it makes covering even famously dense shows like “The Wire” or “Game of Thrones” feel like recapping “Blue’s Clues.”

And this second-to-last episode of the show’s fifth season is even more complicated than the average. The conspiracy to take down Bobby Axelrod by involving him in a shady cannabis-funded banking deal, hatched by his enemies Chuck Rhoades, Mike Prince, Kate Sacker and Taylor Mason, is as dizzying a display of double- and triple-crossing as the show has ever served up.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Chuck Rhoades is cooking eggs.

That’s it. That’s the scene.

For three uninterrupted minutes — without dialogue, without music, without so much as a single cut — the attorney general for the great state of New York cracks, scrambles, fries, flips and serves an omelet to his daughter, Eva (Alexa Swinton), and their guest, the billionaire Mike Prince. In “Billions” time, those three minutes might as well be an eternity. Suddenly, we’re miles away from the mile-a-minute patter and breakneck plot twists that make “Billions” one of the fastest-moving shows on television. For these three minutes, it is slow cinema, a cousin to the endless floor-sweeping and glacial soup-sipping of its sister Showtime series, “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

That this happens in the most momentous episode so far of the season’s long-delayed latter half seems like no coincidence. As the first installment to truly address the Covid-19 pandemic — it appears to be set after the initial quarantine stage, when people started making their way back to workplaces and family gatherings — it is keenly interested in the ways human beings connect. There’s video conferencing and FaceTiming, as well as spirited dinner conversations, an in-office date and an intimate phone call. Viewed in this context, the omelet scene is an attempt to slow things down and capture the vibe of what it’s like to pull an all-nighter with a colleague, share a joint and then fix an early breakfast for your daughter.

I wrote about last night’s episode of Billions, which contains one of my favorite scenes in the history of the show-slash-on TV all year, for the New York Times.

“He’s not dead till I say he’s dead,” says Bobby Axelrod of his decabillionaire rival, Mike Prince.

“Bobby Axelrod has to be wiped from the face of the earth,” says Mike Prince of his decabillionaire rival, Bobby Axelrod.

Heck yeah, says I.

“Billions” is never better than when its combatants (often a more apt word than “characters”) have well and truly joined the battle against one another, concocting complex schemes and building toward dramatic denouements for their rivalries. As this week’s episode drew to a close, not one but three worthy adversaries — Mike Prince; Chuck Rhoades; and, in something of a surprise, Taylor Mason — had all joined forces to take Bobby Axelrod down.

Will it stick? Probably no more or less than all their past attempts, including those that took place in this very episode. Will it be fun to watch? I would bet a decabillionaire’s daily ill-gotten gains on it.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Chuck Rhodes has shaved off his beard. But he wants to be clear: It’s not that big a deal.

“You look ready to toss your cap in the air at West Point!” exclaims his underling Karl Allard (Allan Havey).

Rhodes’s weary reply? “Don’t make a whole thing of it.”

My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that this new clean-shaven Chuck Rhodes has more to do with the vagaries of scheduling talent for the back half of this Covid-scrambled season than a decision made in the writers’ room. If your show stars Paul Giamatti, and if he has gone beardless sometime during the many months since you were last able to film, then by God, your main character will go beardless as well.

But “Don’t make a whole thing of it” doubles as a mantra for the entire … what should we call it? A half-season premiere? Season Five version 2.0? However you slice it, the writers have taken a steady-as-she-goes approach to the show’s return. No hard reset, no launching point for a slew of brand-new story lines — this is a standard “Billions” episode, which is to say it simply advances its pre-existing plotlines in dense and dizzying style, through crackling dialogue and confident performances.

I’m back on the Billions beat for the New York Times, starting with my review of the show’s big return last night.

In our two most recent Patreon-exclusive mini-podcasts, Stefan Sasse and I discuss how shows with bad first seasons sometimes wind up with great second seasons, and everything we didn’t like about Game of Thrones! Go subscribe and listen!

The annual holiday tradition returns: I wrote about ten of the year’s best TV music cues for Vulture.

Directed by David Costabile (who plays Wags) from a script by Emily Hornsby and the co-showrunners Brian Koppelman and David Levien, this episode of “Billions” is replete with punchy plotlines and payoffs. Schemes are cooked up and pulled off in rapid-fire succession, ending with a declaration of all-out war. Thanks to a Covid-19-necessitated hiatus, the episode stands as an ersatz season finale, and as such it stands tall.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions, the last for some time I’m afraid, for the New York Times.

Fakes, forgeries, phonies, fugazis — they’re all very much on the brain of this week’s crackerjack episode of ‘Billions.’ For some characters, faking it is all they know how to do

I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

As a music cue, [Neil] Young’s plaintive ballad [“Old Man”] makes emotional sense, even if crosscutting between the two old men in question drives the point home a bit too hard. Young’s old-before-its-time voice erases any edge of condescension his youth might have brought to the material at the time he recorded it — he was 24, amazingly. It’s the sound of a young man trying to find common ground with one of his elders, and the song never reveals whether the effort is successful. Chuck and Bobby, two complicated men with difficult fathers, could surely relate.

I reviewed tonight’s Billions for the New York Times.

Wendy Rhoades stares at the man opposite her. And stares. And stares. And stares some more.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

“Billions” is a show that seems to appreciate pro wrestling, as seen in the fandom of its dudebro character Mafee and the recent cameo by Becky Lynch. So I hope it’s not too indulgent to quote one of the great heel wrestlers, Ted DiBiase, better known as the Million Dollar Man, as a kind of epigraph for this episode: “Everybody’s got a price.”

I know, I know: That’s kind of the point of the whole show, right? It’s a drama about the corrupting influence of money and power. But it felt more poignant in this week’s episode than it has in quite some time, perhaps because the institutions being assailed by the show’s money-talks characters — family, art, education, the environment — feel sacrosanct.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Mike Prince gets there first. Just as the conference is wrapping up with one last dinner, he presents his guest of honor: Bram Longriver. “You stole my shaman,” Bobby tells Prince hilariously. (It reminded me of one of the best lines in the rock documentary “Dig!”, in which the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s lead singer, Anton Newcombe, angrily declares “You [expletive] broke my sitar, [expletive]!”)

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times. The only recap of Billions to reference the Brian Jonestown Massacre, guaranteed!