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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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Just finished Season 5 Episode 9. When Taylor pops into a meeting with a Prince and and Chuck I threw up in my mouth a little. 
 

Again, why in the hell did Axe bring Taylor back? 
 

And they’ve played the using dad as leverage card so many times I’ve lost count. It’s a fun show that zips along with funny pop culture references, but there hasn’t been a logical season arc/plot since the conclusion of Season 2. 
 

 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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Oh, it gets markedly stupider.  But there's some pithy scenes, great secondary casting, and I could watch Condola Rashad (Kate Sacker) discuss U.S. Annotated Code in a pencil skirt for hours.  Seasons 2 & 3 are the best of the series IMO.  Seasons 4 & 5 are just Chuck in a circle of political redundancy (though the USAG subplot is kinda compelling) and then Axe and Taylor backstabbing one another to no avail over and over and over and over and over again.  Season 6 just finished, haven't really reflected on it much.  The second set of episodes within that season were hastily completed due to Covid and Damian Lewis (Axe) losing his wife in real life.  They tried to wrap some shit up and set up Season 7 so I'll give 'em a pass for a choppy 6.  

The writing is okay to good.  The cast (again, the secondary and tertiaries in particular) are great.  But the plots/subplots are just so predictable and non-compelling.  The romantic twists aren't remotely interesting because almost everyone on the show is a garbage human being.  And the show just beats Deus ex Machina into the fucking ground.  "What's this?  Bobby's in trouble for real this time?  No worries, in the last 2 minutes of the episode...it will be revealed he was running a long game on the trade in question and has magically exonerated himself and made millions in the meantime."  

But yeah, stick with it.  Nothing else worth a shit on Showtime these days until "City on a Hill' comes back.

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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They dropped the last 4-5 episodes of Season 6 about a month ago.  They weren't great, they weren't terrible.  It was their best attempt at trying to wrap things up given compressed production with Covid-19 plus Damien Lewis unable to fully commit with the loss of his wife.  It was pretty clunky, though well acted...tries at some storylines (two of them of a romantic version) that never take off.  But again, gotta give 'em a pass because of the massive external factors.  Show's getting worse overall, macro level.  But who are we kidding?  We'll keep watching.  I think spinoff company with Dollar Bill and Mafee while using former Axe assets like Hall and the big lawyer dude have infinite possibilities.  A few other really interesting possibilities with Wendy, Kate, and Wags.  So what'll happen?  Yep, 53 minutes a week devoted to Taylor Mason Carbon's contemplative devotion to ESG investing being thwarted by Wall Street at every turn.  Brought to you by the following 3 facial expressions and 2 sweaters.  

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Juicy

Juicy 728

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17 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Can somebody explain the breakfast scene to me? Did Koppelman want to demonstrate that Paul Giamatti can flip an omelet? 5 minutes and they shot it in some weird security camera angle. Just bizarre. 

Dude, this scene blows my mind too. I have no fucking clue why it was in there. It doesn't fit anything that billions has done for 6 years.

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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It was to suggest that Chuck was done for because of his failure to see the scam being pulled on him.  But as with "Big Night", there is a suggestion that his fortunes will improve once again because of someone close to him elevating his game.  But the cinematography itself was fucking weird.

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66BUFF

66BUFF 2574

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15 hours ago, Lobo said:

They dropped the last 4-5 episodes of Season 6 about a month ago.  They weren't great, they weren't terrible.  It was their best attempt at trying to wrap things up given compressed production with Covid-19 plus Damien Lewis unable to fully commit with the loss of his wife.  It was pretty clunky, though well acted...tries at some storylines (two of them of a romantic version) that never take off.  But again, gotta give 'em a pass because of the massive external factors.  Show's getting worse overall, macro level.  But who are we kidding?  We'll keep watching.  I think spinoff company with Dollar Bill and Mafee while using former Axe assets like Hall and the big lawyer dude have infinite possibilities.  A few other really interesting possibilities with Wendy, Kate, and Wags.  So what'll happen?  Yep, 53 minutes a week devoted to Taylor Mason Carbon's contemplative devotion to ESG investing being thwarted by Wall Street at every turn.  Brought to you by the following 3 facial expressions and 2 sweaters.  

Dollar Bill in control = all gas and no brakes.  I was shocked that Victor did not bolt with DB and Mafee.

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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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I wish they ended the show after Season 5. It wasn't a good season. Very uneven of course due to Covid halting production. Moving on without a lead character never seems to work. 

The only cool part: 

Spoiler

Axe's escape was pretty awesome. The bait and swtich and how they got him out of the country were excellent scenes. 

 

Edited by billfromlaketravis
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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29199

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i still can't tell where they're gonna go with the chuck-prince relationship.  last we saw, it was all, "i'm coming for you", and now it's like they're pals and prince seems determined to keep it clean.  obviously that will fade because chuck needs an enemy.

speaking of which, i hope mckean sticks around.  melville revere lol.

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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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I watched the Season 6 opener. 

I don't understand Chuck. His father is probably a billionaire at this point, but Chuck hates billionaires. The show has hammered us over the head with this sentiment again and again. So is Chuck going to take down his dad? 

Also Prince dispatches Melville Revere (great old money Yankee name) because his company makes non-lethal weapons? How is that dirty, blood stained money? If anything pepper spray and rubber bullets keep police officers safe and are a much better alternative to lethal police shootings. 

Wendy's character makes a bizarre heel turn from f*** off Prince to actively coaching him all within one episode. 

The only interesting element to Season 6 is Wags trying to survive. 

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wild_turkey

wild_turkey 3220

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I reluctantly watched season 1 after family members kept saying how good this show is. What a slog that was.

When it first aired, it didn't look like a premise I would be interested in. I should've trusted my gut on this one. I put Billions in the category of bad television pretending to be good television, alongside shows like Ozark, Yellowstone, and Handmaid's Tale. 

I don't like any of the main characters. A few of the secondary characters are ok, but they get overshadowed by people I really don't care for. Chuck and Wendy are not sympathetic at all and the premise of their marriage combined with their respective careers is hard to swallow.

I get the feeling that Axe is supposed to be the type of villain that you silently root for but I don't think he has any redeeming qualities. He doesn't seem especially intelligent or clever or charismatic, just manipulative and vindictive. He's like a Lance Armstrong of hedge fund investors. They could've added a little more Jordan Belfort or Don Draper to his personality and made his character much better. 

I binge Band of Brothers every 2-3 years. I'm concerned that if I continue watching, my hatred for Axe will spill over and make it hard for me to like Dick Winters.

The employees of Axe Capital are laughably bad. They are supposedly top Ivy League grads but they continually do dumb shit and they dress like they work in IT for a school district. Not casual-trendy tech startup style, more like sales rack at Kohl's style. And then at some point 3 of them set out on their own and they torpedo their new company because they are dumb enough to bet everything on a false tip from Dollar Bill. Uh huh, Ivy League grads. They all look mostly incompetent.

If this was only 2 seasons I would probably ride it out to get to the conclusion. When I saw 6 seasons and 12 episodes each...time to bail. You can't have Chuck and Axe playing cat and mouse for that long and keep it remotely interesting. Maybe I'll watch those YouTube recaps that are intended to refresh people for new seasons, just to get a quick summary of how things play out. Not even sure it's worth that effort. Television shouldn't be a chore

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lateshow

lateshow 1309

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1 minute ago, thrillhammer said:

I'm kinda with the last few posters.  was a decent, even refreshing, show for a while but has run it's course.  it seems rehashed now and not a redeeming likable character on the show.  all of them scheming, selfserving, backbiting, and superficial.

I haven't even tried to watch this season. I checked out as soon as Axe left. 

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29199

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29 minutes ago, lateshow said:

I haven't even tried to watch this season. I checked out as soon as Axe left. 

this is going to take a while, but let me try to explain what's been happening in the 7 episodes so far:

olympics, olympics, we need to get the olympics to new york, olympics, olympics, governor, mayor, olympics.

they replaced axe with stoll, but stoll plays a good guy.  they have to have chuck go after him, because that's what chuck does.  so instead of making stoll a bad guy worth going after, they're basically manufacturing reasons to try and convince us he's worth going after.  spoiler alert - it's not working.  i'm rooting for stoll just to make chuck look silly while i quietly play on my phone.

if you're interested in starting billions from the beginning, watch seasons 1-4, then stop.  it's fun until then.  team ice juice.

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sidis

sidis 9832

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2 hours ago, BigDHornfan said:

needs more tits.

sorry,  needs some tits.

honestly...agreed.  i thought we might get some payoff with them taking the olympic committee members to the high end whorehouse but they couldn't even spare us anything there.

bullshit.

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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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6 hours ago, lateshow said:

I haven't even tried to watch this season. I checked out as soon as Axe left. 

Brian Koppelman is an intelligent guy. He’s a cinephile. He understands films and television, yet he broke a cardinal rule. Don’t attempt to keep the show going after the lead actor departs. It never works. 
 

I assume Showtime offered him enough money to temporarily forget this rule. 

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RomaVicta

RomaVicta 30072

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I re-upped Showtime and watched last season and then became current on this season. There's just enough to keep me watching.

Two things I'm hating: 

First, the constant referencing movies and sports and then talking about referencing movies and sports. We have writers who are lazy but feel like they're being really smart. 

Second, the whole millennials aspect is also lazy. Characters who are not millennials are like people with different traits and tendencies. Characters who are millennials are stereotyped as coddled nerdballs or way-cool I'll do my thing free spirits. You'd think the thing is written by boomers who browsed a simplistic article about a generation and then mixed in their experience of their own spoiled upper-class children. It's embarrasssing.

I do think the plotting remains good. The way the battles take place is clever.

However, I agree that the Olympics being in NYC doesn't do much for me, and Chuck's motivation for going after the tiresomely good mogul is tenuous at best. 

I'll ride the plane down and get whatever pleasure out of it that they offer.

Edited by RomaVicta
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Brandywine

Brandywine 1320

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6 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I re-upped Showtime and watched last season and then became current on this season. There's just enough to keep me watching.

Two things I'm hating: 

First, the constant referencing movies and sports and then talking about referencing movies and sports. We have writers who are lazy, but feel like they're being really smart. 

Second, the whole millennials aspect is also lazy. Characters who are not millennials are like people with different traits and tendencies. Characters who are millennials are stereotyped as coddled nerdballs or way-cool I'll do my thing free spirits. You'd think the thing is written by boomers who browsed an simplistic article about a generation and then mixed in their experience of their own spoiled upper-class children. It's embarrasssing.

I do think the plotting remains good. The way the battles take place is clever.

However, I agree that the Olympics being in NYC doesn't do much for me, and Chuck's motivation for going after the tiresomely good mogul is tenuous at best. 

I'll ride the plane down and get whatever pleasure out of it that they offer.

You’re spot on. The constant movie and sports references is tiring. It would be one thing if only a few of the characters mentioned them but every one does. Not real. And Chuck is on a constant revenge tour on everyone he personally hates. Is that all the AG does? Wait! I live in Texas and that is all our AG does. 

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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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What an odd show. Prince would rather invest in hypersonic travel bullshit than the evil fossil fuel companies. Oxy, Hess, XOM were the top performers in 2022. Koppelman knows his films and bourbon, but he knows less than dick about investing. 
 

I still don’t understand the Chuck hates Prince because he’s too rich dynamic. Chuck vs Axe made sense because it was a deeply personal conflict. Thank God they’re bringing Axe back for the final season. 

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UpperWestside

UpperWestside 6216

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I have never seen this a show. However, at the Wall Street tree lighting in 2018 they had us do five takes for a scene from this show where a boxer was doing a press conference weigh-in type thing of memory serves correct. Someone on here told me that scene was in the show.

I also did what a lot of people here do in the summer and I worked a party in the Hamptons. My restaurant’s chef does catering for what was the original house on this show I believe. There were 700 people there for the day and I got some good laughs at what I believe was Gronk’s younger brother dancing shirtless for two hours. Gronk was there too and he was really nice, but goodness you could see how much pain that guy is in by how he walks.Shaq was there too as a guest speaker and I met him in passing, which is to say he gave a thumbs up when I said “how are you doing?”  

The house is owned by Michael Loeb. It was a pretty cool house and the beach was nice in that it has been left alone. The clay tennis court in fro t of the house was pretty awesome honestly. 

 

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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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24 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

I have never seen this a show. However, at the Wall Street tree lighting in 2018 they had us do five takes for a scene from this show where a boxer was doing a press conference weigh-in type thing of memory serves correct. Someone on here told me that scene was in the show.

I also did what a lot of people here do in the summer and I worked a party in the Hamptons. My restaurant’s chef does catering for what was the original house on this show I believe. There were 700 people there for the day and I got some good laughs at what I believe was Gronk’s younger brother dancing shirtless for two hours. Gronk was there too and he was really nice, but goodness you could see how much pain that guy is in by how he walks.Shaq was there too as a guest speaker and I met him in passing, which is to say he gave a thumbs up when I said “how are you doing?”  

The house is owned by Michael Loeb. It was a pretty cool house and the beach was nice in that it has been left alone. The clay tennis court in fro t of the house was pretty awesome honestly. 

 

Dollar Bill boxes his former rival Mafee. I believe Wilder was in a couple scenes training 1 of them. It was in Season 4. 

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UpperWestside

UpperWestside 6216

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13 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Dollar Bill boxes his former rival Mafee. I believe Wilder was in a couple scenes training 1 of them. It was in Season 4. 

Cool man. It was kinda random to be shooting that scene at a tree lighting, but we just kinda stumbled into it and it didn’t take long. I want to say that the year before I heard Sal Valentinetti singing “New York, New York” in the same place. He was a contestant on America’s Got Talent that sings  like a crooner.  He sounds almost exactly like Sinatra singing that song, but was maybe 20 or so when he went on the show.

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HiggyBaby

HiggyBaby 2558

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I still don’t understand the Chuck hates Prince because he’s too rich dynamic. Chuck vs Axe made sense because it was a deeply personal conflict. Thank God they’re bringing Axe back for the final season. 


I gave up halfway through season 6 because of the terribleness previously described and that I found I just didn’t find the Chuck vs Prince thing very compelling. But if you are sayin Axe is coming back it sounds like I need to suck it up and finish out season 6.
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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11601

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1 hour ago, HiggyBaby said:

 


I gave up halfway through season 6 because of the terribleness previously described and that I found I just didn’t find the Chuck vs Prince thing very compelling. But if you are sayin Axe is coming back it sounds like I need to suck it up and finish out season 6.

 

Yeah I’m limping through Season 6 to get to 7. I believe it comes back in August so there’s plenty of time. 

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Brandywine

Brandywine 1320

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On 7/6/2023 at 1:41 PM, billfromlaketravis said:

Yeah I’m limping through Season 6 to get to 7. I believe it comes back in August so there’s plenty of time. 

Are they going to drag it out and divide a season into 2 parts? I’m really getting tired of that being done now, on every series it seems. 

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Brandywine

Brandywine 1320

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Just finished the second to last episode and in true style they set it up for Axe and crew to lose. Everything going against them. I just hope that it will end with its “what the f***!!!, I didn’t see that coming” moment where they’ve been planning this get back the whole season behind the scenes. Can’t wait until next week.

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