I remember when I was a teenager when Roseanne changed the actress who played Becky from Lacy Gorenson to Sarah Chalke. I remember because they also changed it back, and made a joke of it to the television world they belonged it, and I remember because they were acknowledging what is usually considered the nuclear option when an actor chooses to leave a series: they recast the role.
It doesn’t happen that often – the most notorious abusers of it are daytime soap operas - and the times it does it serves as an example for how lazy the fans were at one point. More often then not, when faced with a lead actor departing a series – whether due to death or the actor has decided to leave the series - the writers of any series, network, cable, or streaming, will bite the bullet, and find a way to dispose of the character. It’s almost always an off-screen death – sometimes taken serious as it was for 8 Simple Rules and John Ritter; sometimes facetiously as it was for Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men - and often the death does damage to the series that it can never recover from - Glee was never the same show after Cory Monteith overdosed.
The larger problem is, of course, not so much the character dying but the showing deciding to shoulder on regardless. I realize that Kevin Spacey’s off-screen behavior on House of Cards left the showrunners in an impossible box for the sixth season, but I think the series would have been better served had they just left the fifth season finale stand as it did and not try to do the ill-fated sixth season which was regarded as a mess. Some series can recover from their leads departure – James Spader taking over the lead from Dylan McDermott in The Practice not only rejuvenated a very stale drama but inspired an entire spinoff – but those are exceptions and usually signs of desperation. It is notable that even in the age of Peak TV almost every great drama that while character death is a frequent visitor; every series that kills it characters off has the benefit of having planned for it and a path forward.
This brings me, in a roundabout way, to Billions. In the early years of my columns, I considered this Showtime series about the battles between hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and relentless prosecutor Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) one of the most undervalued shows in Peak TV. Brilliantly written and superbly acting, I believe that at its peak, Billions was vastly superior to Succession and Ozark, two frequent contenders for best shows on television with nowhere near the cleverness of the writing. It featured some of the greatest character actors in its ensemble such as Maggie Siff, David Costabile and a ground-breaking portrayal by Asia Kate Dillon and one of the greatest groups of recurring actors in the past decade. In recent years, I became aware of many of the flaws in the show’s writing, but that did nothing to diminish its ability to engage.
Then in 2020, the pandemic happened. Two things happened when filming resumed in the spring of 2021. Damien Lewis decided to leave the show, and the series was renewed for a sixth season. For a series that relied on the presence of its two leads perhaps heavier than any series in TV history since The X-Files, this was catastrophic.
I realize the writers were faced with few good options when it came to carrying on the series for a sixth season and beyond, but I have to say the course that they chose to carry on with was by far the worst possible one. Bobby fled the country, escaping justice. Before he did, he sold off his company to his rival from the past season Mike Prince (Corey Stoll), the man he had spent all of Season 5 trying to destroy and who had spent much of that same season working with Chuck to bring Bobby down. No one connected with Axe Capital leadership was arrested. Prince took over ownership of Axe Capital, and retained with a couple of exceptions, the entire staff including Chuck’s ex-wife Wendy (Siff). Wags, Axe’s second in command (Costabile) and Taylor, who had spend four seasons alternately trying to learn from and then destroy Axe (Dillon) Some stayed because of loyalty to the company; some because they had no financial alternative, but they stayed. And Chuck, who had spent five seasons trying to bring down Axe at the cost of his personal fortune and his marriage, spent all of two minutes grieving and then instantly went on to make Prince his next target.
As I said, there weren’t a lot of good options for the writers going forward. The only plausible one I could have seen would have been an even more nuclear one then the loss of just Lewis. Prince would have cast off most of the old firm, filled in with loyalists and made some decisions, arbitrary or not, on who to keep. Some actors would have been reduced to recurring roles, some would have been written out entirely, and those who stayed would have decided just how loyal to be to their new boss. Perhaps someone from within the company – Taylor or even Wendy – could have come to Chuck and offered to be a mole to bring Prince down. It would have been complicated and convoluted, but there are models for this in recent TV history: The Good Wife repeatedly changed the game for Alicia Florrick in the final three seasons and on Homeland, the showrunners chose rather than to keep Damien Lewis’ character alive as unnecessary baggage (which Brody and his family had been for the third season) so that Carrie and the rest of the cast could move on to new adventures. In both cases, the move worked like gangbusters for each series, and the writers for Billions have proven that they are at least that clever in the first four seasons.
Having watched almost all of the sixth season over the past year, it is fundamentally clear that not only did the writers fundamentally decide to go along with the basic mission statement they stared with – only changing one of the leads – they did so at the cost of fundamentally destroying all the credibility and character development that we had seen over five seasons. It had been frustrating at times to see Chuck Rhoades bull-headed determination to bring Axelrod down at the expense of everything else, but at least it gave his character meaning. To just wait all of two minutes and turn all his attention to destroying Mike Prince reduces Chuck to equivalent a video game character who wants to fight his next boss.
And it doesn’t help matter that the writers make Prince abandon the basic principles he had in Season 5 – he was shown to be basically a more altruistic billionaire than the ruthless Axe was. Now, it’s just a front for being as ruthless and determined to destroy his enemies. He may have a different set of goals than Axe ever did, but the series makes no ever to have him seem like anything but a different kind of monster. At which point you wonder, what was the point of even putting in a different character in the first place?
And this would be devastating enough if it hadn’t also fundamentally destroyed everything we’d come to love about the supporting cast and make them superfluous as well. Wags was a ruthless fixer who was lovable for his willingness to do whatever it took for Bobby. The fact that he’s willing to do the exact same thing for Prince – who almost never returns the favor, preferring the company and advice of his own people – makes him seem little more than a stooge who’s outlived his purpose. Taylor’s cool detachment from everything was fascinating at times because you couldn’t see what was behind their gaze and neutral tone. Sometimes they wanted to defeat Axe; sometimes they wanted to become Axe. Now Taylor seems utterly without purpose, not sure whether to lead, follow or get out of the way. They spent much of the last few episodes trying to vie for a leadership role at Prince’s firm, but one wonders why they would fight so hard for something that isn’t there any more.
But by far the character who has been destroyed the most is Wendy. At alternate points in Billions I considered her the conscience and just as ruthless as the two men in her life. But now Axe is gone and in his place is a man who has no history with her and probably wouldn’t take advice from her anyway. Most of the staff no longer listens to her advice, and those who have just joined seem inclined to do the opposite. You would think given that she might feel at least some obligation to her ex-husband to try and protect Prince's desire to destroy him. But she doesn’t raise a hand to stop Prince, nor even warn her husband about what’s coming. She wandered through most of Season 6 utterly detached from the action. It was revealed she had written a book, revealing all the details of what happened behind the scenes at her business and the kind of boss Mike Prince was. This was a destructive action and out of character, but I honestly would have preferred if she had followed through with it and been willing to burn the place to the ground. Instead, she took it as the same path of superficial growth that she’s been following all season and destroyed her own book. The most fascinating character on this series has been reduced to a supernumerary.
Billions has been renewed for a seventh season and is being advertised now as a battle between a disgraced Chuck as he tries to stop Mike Prince from becoming President of the United States. That’s the kind of plot that fundamentally belongs a different show, certainly not the one I watched with such anticipation six seasons ago. More to the point, I can’t imagine anyone who started watching the series all those years who would care how this battle ends. It was clear long before Lewis left the series that the endgame of Billions was going to be with the victor having lost everything else in the process of destroying the loser. The problem is, that’s already happened…and the series is still going on. I don’t know what the writers could have done to make their horrible situation better. All I know is that right now, having Bob Odenkirk or Jason Bateman with their hair dyed red, claiming they were now ‘Axe’ seems like an infinitely better scenario than the one the series is going through now.
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