Billions: a submissive lead, held for seven years

Showtime opened Billions on 17 January 2016 with its lead prosecutor bound on a floor while a woman whose face the camera withholds administers pain to him. The identity of the woman is held back until the end of the episode, when she turns out to be his wife. Paul Giamatti plays Chuck Rhoades, Maggie Siff plays Wendy, and the series created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin ran for seven seasons and eighty-four episodes before finishing on 29 October 2023.

That opening is the most quoted thing about the show and the least examined. Worth spending a moment on what withholding the woman’s face actually does.

The pilot buys its shock by making a wife anonymous

For the length of one episode, Wendy Rhoades is a technique without a person attached. She is competent, silent and unidentified, and the scene is constructed so that the audience reads her as a professional providing a service. The reveal then converts her into a spouse, and the conversion is supposed to land as a surprise about Chuck.

It lands as a surprise about Chuck because the show has spent an episode treating her as furniture. Run the second and third passes of how to read a picture of power over that opening and the arithmetic is plain: the submissive party is lit, named, given interiority and given the point of view, while the dominant party is denied a face. The pose says one thing and the camera says the opposite, which is the oldest arrangement in this material and not remotely a subversion of it.

Everything the series does well with the subject afterwards is a slow correction of that first scene.

There is a footnote to it that belongs in the body. According to The Ringer’s oral history, Maggie Siff took the part having sought assurances that the material would be used sparingly and not salaciously, which is to say that the terms of her own visibility were negotiated before a frame was shot. That negotiation is the one the series never dramatises and the one its subject is actually about.

Seven seasons of the audience already knowing

Television’s standard treatment of kink is the revelation episode. A character is exposed, a marriage wobbles, an hour of plot is extracted from the exposure, and the subject is retired. It is a structure that treats the material as information, and information can only be delivered once.

Billions declines it, and declines it for a long time. From the pilot onward the audience knows. Nobody inside the story does anything with the knowledge for more than three years. In the interval the practice functions as characterisation rather than as jeopardy: it is a thing this marriage contains, mentioned, resumed, negotiated around, occasionally strained, and never treated as the plot’s engine. Eighty-four episodes is enough runway for a dynamic to be ordinary, and ordinariness is the register a two-hour film struggles to reach with this subject. Peter Strickland gets there in a feature by compressing a whole marriage into a single repeated routine. Television gets there by having the time to be boring about it.

When the disclosure finally arrives, in the fortieth episode of the series, the audience is not learning anything. That inversion is the show’s real formal achievement. The suspense in “Overton Window” is not what Chuck will say. It is what saying it will cost, and to whom.

The speech, and the person who did not agree to it

Circumstances make this the part of the arc most worth writing about, and the part most often reported as a triumph.

Chuck is being blackmailed. Wendy argues that they should stand down, on the grounds that they will lose and be humiliated. Chuck argues that the boundary of acceptable public opinion is moving. Wendy disagrees, clearly and in terms, and Chuck goes to the podium and tells the state anyway. He wins the office. She is exposed by her husband, in public, having explicitly refused.

The episode is called “Overton Window”, after the political theory that describes the range of positions the public will currently tolerate. Naming it that is the most revealing thing the series does with the subject. The question of whether two people’s private arrangement can be said out loud has been converted into a question of political timing, to be won or lost by a strategist reading the electorate correctly. It is an accurate account of how disclosure works in public life. It also means the show’s biggest statement about kink is not about desire at all, and that the person whose desire is being disclosed is the one who is not consulted.

Reviewers caught it immediately. Writing for Refinery29 the day after broadcast, Elena Nicolaou argued that the heroic speech does not read as heroic but as selfish, and tracked the episode’s attention to Wendy’s face rather than to Chuck’s victory. That reading is available in the material rather than imposed on it, and it produces the sharpest irony in the whole run. A drama praised for taking consent seriously builds its biggest moment on a man overriding his wife’s refusal, and it does so in an episode where the thing he is disclosing is a practice that exists only by agreement.

Whether the show intends the parallel is arguable. That it commits it is not.

Where the writing flinches

Two places, and they are related.

The first is the frame that came with the idea. By the creators’ own account in The Ringer, the material entered the show through research into powerful men who wanted to give up control, which is a compensation theory: the courtroom bully needs the floor at night to balance the ledger. It is a serviceable character key and it is also a diagnosis, and the series leans on it whenever it needs Chuck’s psychology explained. What it produces is a version of submission that is always about something else, always answering to the day job, never simply a preference the man has.

The second is Wendy. Her paid occupation is to sit inside a hedge fund and manage the interior lives of traders on behalf of the man who owns them, which is a power exchange conducted without a safeword, for money, over people whose livelihoods depend on the outcome. The series is comfortable examining what she does in the bedroom and noticeably less comfortable examining what she does at work. The kink is scrutinised, sympathised with and defended. The professional arrangement, which is the more interesting one, is mostly treated as expertise.

What the long run bought

Set against the rest of this section, Billions is the least ambitious of the series pages and the most useful. It does not argue for anything. It carries a submissive lead through seven years of prestige drama without making his submission his problem, and it hires people who know the subject rather than guessing, which is more than Bonding managed in its first season and more than Obsession attempted at all.

What episodic time teaches, and film has no way to learn, is that duration does the normalising by itself. Show a thing once and it is a statement. Show it across eighty-four episodes, in passing, between subpoenas, and it becomes a fact about two people. The reveal episode is the trope this material cannot escape, and the only reliable escape found so far has been to run long enough that the reveal arrives too late to matter.