Bullet for My Valentine – "Your Betrayal" (2010)

I was told to stay away

Those two words I can’t obey

Pay the price for your betrayal!

The world badly needs someone to tear the very brown-eyed Showtime TV series Billions a new one – and who better than 2 or 3 lines to be that someone? 

The first few seasons of Billions – one reviewer said that the show at its best was “not great” but was “not bad, either” – focus on the efforts of a U.S. Attorney (portrayed by Paul Giamatti) to put a hedge-fund billionaire (portrayed by Damien Lewis) behind bars for various and sundry financial crimes.   

You might assume that the U.S. Attorney was the good guy, and the hedge-fund billionaire was the bad guy. 

It’s true that the billionaire made big bucks by engaging in some pretty shady stock-market shenanigans.  But it’s equally true that the federal prosecutor abuses the power of his government position and engages in all kinds of unethical and illegal behavior in his attempt to convict him.

In other words, they’re both douchebags.  

Lewis with Giamatti: who’s the bigger douchebag?

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After several seasons of Billions, a new billionaire was able to hornswoggle the original billionaire and take control of his hedge fund.  So the attention of the U.S. Attorney – let’s call him “USA” – shifted to the new billionaire (“NB”), and you didn’t hear much about the old billionaire (“OB”) for a while.

In the final season of the show, the NB decided to run for president.  The USA was determined to stop him, whether by hook or by crook.  (Mostly by crook, actually.)

The USA got in touch with the OB – who was hiding out in a foreign country – and the two of them hatched an elaborate plot to bring down the NB.

For the plan to work, the USA and the OB needed the help of a number of the hedge fund’s highest-ranking employees – men and women who the NB had put in positions where they could make a lot of money, and who should have been fiercely loyal to him.

It all worked like a charm, of course – we’re talking about television, after all, not real life.  (The Vox.com reviewer accurately characterized the show’s storytelling as “frequently completely ridiculous, often predicated on its characters hiding incredibly elaborate strategic gambits from each other, to the degree that it’s hard to imagine how they kept something so skillfully from seemingly everybody they knew.”  Truer words were never spoken.)  

After the NB’s billions went up in smoke, he was forced to withdraw from the presidential race.  Billions concludes with him leaving the hedge fund’s offices with his tail between his legs as those who vanquished him celebrated.

The moral of the story?  The end justifies the means.

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I wasn’t a particular fan of the NB, but he was actually less of a greedy b*stard than the OB.  Once the NB decided to run for President, he went in a very wokeward direction with his investments – e.g., he invested a new concrete technology which promised to allow the government to repair our crumbling infrastructure at an affordable price, and deposited hundreds of millions in black-owned inner-city banks.  By contrast, the OB turned his attention to cornering the cryptocurrency market.

But for whatever reason, the Billions writers decided that the NB was BAD, and that it was just fine – even heroic – for the USA, the OB, and pretty much every other character in the show to lie to, steal from, and betray him.

Billions = the Last Supper if
all the disciples were Judases

I could understand the ending of Billions if the USA was a crusader determined to take away a bad guy’s ill-gotten gains.  Or if the OB was a basically honest guy who had been screwed over by the NB.  Or if the NB had exploited and abused his employees rather than promoting them to positions of authority and paying them beaucoup bucks.    

The usual formula for a show like Billions is to have the underdog – or underdogs – come out on top.  If they have to break the rules in order to prevail, we accept that because the villain broke the rules first.

But in Billions, whatever rule-breaking the NB committed paled in comparison to the nasty stuff the USA and OB were guilty of.

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The NB knew that the USA and OB were his enemies.  But he had no idea that his top employees – who all purported to be loyal to him – were secretly preparing to stab him in the back.

There was an attempt to justify their treachery by painting the NB as someone who would be a danger to the planet if he were elected President.  But as far as I was concerned, the efforts to demonize the NB were far from convincing – they were too little and too late given the development of his character up to that point.  

Sure, he had a huge ego and a firm belief that he knew better than anyone else what was best for the country.  But name me a Presidential candidate who didn’t feel that way. 

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As a lawyer, I was particularly appalled by the fact that the NB’s lawyer was one of the chief co-conspirators against him.

Lawyers have many duties to their clients.  They are expected to handle legal matters carefully and competently, to keep a client’s information confidential, to avoid conflicts of interest, and to keep their clients fully informed.  

But you can really sum up a lawyer’s duties to a client in one word: LOYALTY.  The client comes first – period.

There are circumstances where a lawyer can refuse to carry out a client’s wishes.  For example, a lawyer’s duty of loyalty to his client may not justify his keeping his mouth shut if he learns that his client intends to engage in fraudulent or criminal conduct.

That wasn’t really the case in Billions.  The NB’s lawyer would have been justified in asking him to clean up his act if she thought he was doing something wrong, and then terminating their attorney-client relationship if he didn’t – after she informed him of what the traitors within and without his company were up to.

But she wasn’t justified in pretending to be loyal to the NB while she was working directly against him and lying to him about what she was doing.  She was like a doctor who tells a patient with a serious infection that she is prescribing a state-of-the-art antibiotic when she is actually giving him placebo pills until the infection progresses far enough that it can no longer be treated.

In the world of Billions, the attorney was a hero who is last seen having a glass of bubbly with her co-conspirators.  

In the world of 2 or 3 lines, she’s a modern-day Judas who deserves to be sued for every penny she owns and banned from ever practicing law again.

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One final note.

Billions was accurately described by that Vox.com reviewer as “a series seemingly about rich white guys measuring their d*cks.”

Two years earlier, the Observer.com had characterized a debate between the OB and the USA in the final episode of the first season of Billions as a “season-ending d*ck-measuring contest.” 

Buzzfeednews.com’s variation on that theme was to say the show was “dominated by bros vying to prove who has the biggest balls.”  (I almost didn’t read the Buzzfeednews.com review of the show, which was headlined “Billions Has Become TV’s Sharpest Critique Of Toxic Masculinity.  Sure enough, that article turned out to be so full of sh*t that its eyes were brown.)

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Bullet for My Valentine is a Welsh metal band that sounds like what you’d get if Metallica and Linkin Park had a one-night stand sans birth control.  

“Your Betrayal” is the first track on the group’s 2010 album, Fever.  It’s too bad it wasn’t used in the final episode of Billions.  

Click here to listen to “Your Betrayal.”

Click here to buy “Your Betrayal” from Amazon.

Billy Joel – "Allentown" (1982)

Well, I’m living here in Allentown

And it’s hard to keep a good man down

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I shared a few of the many pop-culture references that the scriptwriters for the Showtime TV series, Billions, filled up their scripts with – presumably because it was too hard for them to write the naturalistic dialogue that is the sine qua non of a compelling television series.  

Here are a few more examples of those references.  To save you the trouble of Googling them, I’ve provided explanations below each screenshot:

(Chris Shiherlis was the character portrayed
 by Val Kilmer in the 1995 movie, Heat.)

(“Shut down like Allentown” is a
reference to today’s featured song.)

(Trautman and Teasle are characters
 in the 1982 movie, First Blood
– the first of the Rambo movies.)

(Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner is the New York
Jets cornerback who was voted the NFL
Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2022.)

(Magnus Carlsen is the Norwegian chess
grandmaster who has held the #1 spot in
the FIDE world chess rankings since 2011.)

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s one final example of the pop-culture references in the Billions scripts:

If you understand that one, you might not want to admit it: Nikki Dial and Rocco Siffredi were big porn stars in the nineties.

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Bethlehem Steel – which once employed 300,000 workers – took its name from the Pennsylvania city where it was headquartered.  

So why did Billy Joel title his song about the decline of steel manufacturing in the Lehigh Valley after the neighboring city of Allentown?  Partly because of the religious connotations of Bethlehem, and partly because Joel thought it would be easier to come up with words that rhymed with Allentown.

Click here to listen to “Allentown,” which was released on Billy Joel’s eighth studio album, The Nylon Curtain, in 1982.

Click here to buy “Allentown” from Amazon.

Al Wilson – "Listen To Me" (1973)

You can’t tell by what he wears

If he’s good or bad

The scriptwriters for Billions – the Showtime TV series whose seventh and final season aired in 2023 – aren’t stupid.  

They are smart enough to know that it’s a b*tch to write naturalistic dialogue.  So instead of even trying to do that, they filled up their scripts for Billions with references to movies, books, recording artists, athletes, and other TV shows.  

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I gave you some examples of those references – some of which are pretty obscure.

Like this one:

(Who the hell is Russell Ziskey?  He’s the character portrayed by the late Harold Ramis in the 1981 comedy movie, Stripes.)

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How many of the following Billions references do you recognize?

Let’s start with a relatively easy movie reference:

(The late Henry Hill was a mobster whose life story was the basis for the 1990 Martin Scorsese film, Goodfellas.  In 1967, Hill and an associate walked into the Air France cargo terminal at JFK Airport and walked out with $420,000 in cash.)

*     *     *     *     *

Do you know what classic rock record is being referred to here?  (Hint: it’s a member of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.)

(“Ooh, a storm is threatening” is the opening line of The Rolling Stones’ 1969 masterpiece, “Let It Bleed.”  Click here to read more about that G.O.A.T. recording.)

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Finally, do you know what truly terrifying movie is being referenced in the following three screenshots?

(Forget Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, and The Shining.  The scariest movie of all time – at least for males – is Deliverance, John Boorman’s 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s 1970 novel.  However much they paid Ned Beatty to appear in that movie wasn’t enough.) 

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“Listen to Me” is the B side of the late Al Wilson’s hit single, “Show and Tell,” which took over the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” 51 years ago this week.

Click here to listen to “Listen to Me.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.