by Don Hall

Up until the last season, I loved House of Cards. The intrigue and four-dimensional chess playing done in the name of acquiring power were fascinating but what made it work for me was the incredible writing and the masterful actors spinning those words like strippers working a pole.

Kevin Spacey may very well be a creepy dude, using his personal success to seduce teenage boys into the sack, but he is an incredible actor on the screen. In the first two seasons, it's obvious these scenery-chewing thespians were having fun playing villains and heroes set in the halls of American governmental power-grabbing.

At least once per episode there would be a turn of phrase or a statement made that had me smacking my face and thinking Fuck. I wish I had written that.

“There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.”

“I’ve always loathed the necessity of sleep. Like death, it puts even the most powerful men on their backs.”

“Power is a lot like real estate. It’s all about location, location, location. The closer you are to the source, the higher your property value.”

Given that I have as much use for power or money as a boy born without hands has for a deck of cards, I can view this melodrama from a vantage of fascination rather than life lessons. I know a few people hungry enough for this sort of worldview and their take on Frank Underwood is a bit more instructive. Me? I'd love the money and maybe the power but the only pedagogical metric provided by Frank is that, in order to achieve the money and the power, the kind of work necessary is just not my bag.

Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, however, the stories of gods and kings are still fascinating. In 2021, the gods are coming from Marvel and the kings are coming from both the political sector and Wall Street. The odds of my having a gamma radiation accident and developing a rage monster alter ego are as stacked as they are against me running for higher office or making more than $50,000 a year, so I can only enjoy the intrigues from my streaming device.

Showtime’s popular series Billions has been locked in the streaming vault since 2016 and features Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti as a rogue billionaire hedge fund owner versus the United States District Attorney of the Southern District of New York. Both kings in the monied and political sense.

In the house-bound pandemic distancing, I discovered five seasons (with a sixth on the way) and I am hooked. Great actors with a fun storyline of corruption, betrayals, alliances, and vendettas. The selling point is the writing, though.

Created and written by Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, this is a series of scripts that combine sumptuous language that most actors could not pull off but this cast nails it. Reminiscent of the scripts of Joel and Ethan Coen without so much of the over-the-top comic performances, Billions is just a blast.

And in each and every episode there are at least five separate moments where I am filled with venomous envy that I didn't write those specific combination of words myself.

“Self-righteousness is an indulgence I cannot afford.”

“I like nightmares. When I wake up, they leave me deeply valuing my reality.”

“You know what it takes to find a truffle? A hog, a dog, whatever keenly scented, carefully trained animal gets the assignment, spends a lifetime traipsing through the dark, sniffing out the slightest aroma. And only then the digging begins. And what do you think they’re digging through?Shit. That’s the thing we don’t say much about, right? The things we most value, the things we pay most dearly to ingest are grown in shit.”

“Only people with money forget about money.”

“As long as justice is served, credit doesn't matter.”

“Corrections are in order. There’s a way to make this work, and that way is hard, but necessary. As Taleb says, 'become antifragile, or die.'”

Goddamn.

My favorite, however, is Mike "Wags" Wagner. Played by David Costabile, it is no mean feat to shine on screen with actors like Lewis and Giamatti but he manages to steal every scene he's in. And the writers love writing phenomenal things for him to say:

“It's time for you folks to sharpen your pencils, and you better come back with one Traci Lords of an idea. And if you need that fucking defined, here it is: a barely legal, market-dominating, brilliant cocksucker of an idea.”

“You know those poison-tip arrows that certain tribes use that go through one guy and kill another? This might be like that — golden frog poison. I tried to smoke it once. Shaman jumped across the tent to stop me.”

“Why should I trust you to do anything other than point me to the nearest avocado toast?”

“Surrendered like a French fucking soldier!”

"Three things in life you can’t postpone without dire consequences: calling a doctor when gutshot, finding a toilet when traveling in India, and paying your people."

"We have to be more pure than the Virgin Mary before her first period."

"To Bobby Axelrod, fees are religion and money is his God. This makes him the perfect shepherd for you in the material world. And at least when you pray to his God, you get another fucking Bentley out of it."

I love Wags. He is a guy who grew up in the eighties and remains unapologetic about it. He manages to live larger-than-life despite being framed by giants and monarchs. He has no fear and lives for the moment.

I doubt I'll ever be a writer of great television. Not really my thing. But if I ever do decide to go that route, I want to write every word like I'm writing for Mike Wagner to say.