• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 15, 2016

I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but the opening scene of Showtime’s new series “Billions” might be the worst I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

For all I know, some people might shower this show with praise, but I was turned off from the get-go by this show’s opening image of actor Paul Giamatti seen from above lying on the floor on his back trussed up with rope and gagged at the mouth.

He was not the victim of a robbery either. Instead, it turns out he was tied up in a meeting with a dominatrix, whose ministrations included burning him in the chest with a lit cigarette and then attempting to alleviate the burn by dousing it with a certain bodily fluid as she stood over him.

And here we come to the point in this blog post where I feel obligated for the umpteenth time to point out the challenges facing a TV columnist when he is tasked with describing certain behaviors depicted on TV these days. Let me please assure you, dear readers, that I try to maintain some level of decorum in the writing of these TV columns, even as the TV industry makes this goal harder to achieve every day. Whenever I come across such scenes, I tend to ask myself the same rhetorical question: Can’t the actors involved -- in this case, the enormously respected Paul Giamatti -- just say no?

The thing about this wet and wild opening sequence is that it had virtually nothing whatsoever to do with what happened afterward in the episode -- which indicates that this scene was used to open the show primarily for some sort of shock value. Well, it worked, but not in a good way.

Not that I needed any more shocks, but the rest of the episode was certainly banal in comparison to this splashy domination sex scene. Premiering this Sunday (Jan. 17), “Billions” is about a hard-driving U.S. attorney in New York named Chuck Rhoades (Giamatti’s character) and a brash hedge fund billionaire with whom this prosecutor intends to do battle. The hedge funder is named Bobby Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis, and he runs a company called Axe Capital.

Maggie Siff plays the U.S. attorney’s wife, Wendy, and Malin Akerman plays Lara Axelrod, wife of Bobby. 

The whole thing adds up to one long cliché. We’ve seen movies and TV shows about these billionaires before, from “The Wolf of Wall Street” to “The Big Short” -- people who game the system, make piles of money and then blow $63 million on a house in the Hamptons just because they can.

In fact, Bobby Axelrod does that in the premiere episode of “Billions” and this acquisition is put forth by this show’s writers as the move that will sour public opinion about him to such a great extent that U.S. Attorney Rhoades will then be emboldened to begin investigating him. In the show, this house purchase makes the fictional front page of a fake New York Post -- a story that, in real life, would not likely qualify as the lead story on a Post front page unless it happened on the world’s slowest news day.

Much of the writing of “Billions” is inept like that. For example, the Lara Axelrod character suddenly launches into an unnatural and awkward expository speech about her working-class origins in Inwood (it’s a neighborhood in upper Manhattan, for those who aren’t from around here).

It’s supposed to position her as tough and vengeful, and we get the message, but it also slanders the fine people of Inwood, which is a lovely neighborhood. And in any case, the speech is a cliché. I remember a great quote from Barbara Stanwyck’s tough-girl character, Lorna, in the 1939 movie “The Golden Boy.” Said she, “I’m a dame from Newark and I know a dozen ways!” It’s really the same thing, isn’t it?

Later in the premiere episode of “Billions,” a character commits suicide somewhere off-camera, and the news hardly causes a ripple in anybody’s day. Hey, screenwriters, the word is drama -- a person killing himself is supposed to be dramatic.

Oh, never mind. What’s the use in pointing out these flaws anyway? How does the old saying go? It’s like tilting at windmills or, more to the point, in the context of the opening scene of “Billions,” it’s like [expletive deleted] in the wind.

“Billions” premieres on Sunday (Jan. 17) at 10 p.m. Eastern on Showtime.