• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 9, 2023

“Billions” premiered only seven years ago in 2016, but so much has happened since then in the TV business that the series -- returning for its seventh and final season this week -- feels like a golden oldie.

It’s not that its story and situations are stale -- because they are not. But think about how much has changed since then.

At the time of the show’s premiere on January 17, 2016, Showtime was a unit of CBS Corp., then presided over by Les Moonves. 

“Billions” was developed and brought to life by a Showtime regime that is long gone. Moonves left under a sexual-harassment cloud in September 2018. 

Viacom merged with CBS to become ViacomCBS in 2019. The whole thing got renamed Paramount Global in 2022. There is still a Showtime, but it is now a cog in a much bigger media machine.   

But even more than just the changes at Viacom and CBS, the character of the entire business changed when the majors all decided to bet the farm and join Netflix in the subscription streaming business.

“Billions” may seem like it came out of a distant age, but it is also true that streaming -- in its case, the company’s streaming service Paramount+ -- gives everlasting life to the show and many others like it.

A line uttered by lawyer Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) in the seventh-season premiere links “Billions” to a series that is much older, but by all accounts popular with a new generation of viewers -- “The Sopranos,” which streams on Max.

When Rhoades has a clandestine meeting with someone in his family’s mausoleum, he remarks to the person that the crypt is like “Uncle Junior’s doctor’s office.”

I had to think about that reference for a minute before I remembered that at some point in “The Sopranos,” Uncle Junior would hold his face-to-face meetings on mob business inside an examining room at his doctor’s office because he was certain the meetings would be neither observed nor overheard.

In the “Billions” season premiere, a reference is made to the War in Ukraine, which helps establish that the new season of “Billions” is rooted in the present.

Like a self-obsessed business titan from the real world, one of the central characters sets his sights on the presidency and vows to run in 2024.

However, Episode One (“701” in the parlance of TV -- meaning Season 7, Episode 1) concludes with a rock song that is 44 years old -- “London Calling” by the Clash. Do younger people even know who the Clash is (or was)?

A crypt is not the only place where some of the “Billions” characters meet secretly. For New Yorkers, the locations used in the show are one of its main attractions.

In Episode 701, the meeting places include the famed Wo Hop on Mott Street in Chinatown, and Famous Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street.

As a story set in the higher reaches of extreme wealth and the jockeying that goes on to secure a piece of it, “Billions” is not unlike “Succession.” 

Although “Succession” was about an aging corporate patriarch and his striving, grasping children, both are billion-dollar soaps.

Long-time fans of “Billions” will love what Episode One of the final season sets up -- an epic clash of wills between some of the show’s longest-running characters.

Showtime is being particularly generous with this finale storyline — a reported 12 episodes, a number almost unheard of for drama series in the streaming era.

The seventh and final season of “Billions” starts on Friday (August 11) on Paramount+ and premieres Sunday (August 13) at 8 p.m. Eastern on Showtime.