Most dramas give you a protagonist and an obstacle. Billions gives you two protagonists — and makes them each other’s obstacle. The pilot’s central structural decision, from which everything else follows, is to grant Chuck Rhoades and Bobby Axelrod equal dramatic standing from the very first scene. Neither is framed as hero or villain; both are rendered with full interiority, genuine intelligence, and legitimate grievance. That symmetry is not merely a character choice. It is a story structure choice, and it determines the entire architecture of the series.
The pilot, written by Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin, is constructed as a series of establishment moves — less concerned with plot than with the precise delineation of two worlds, two power bases, and two psychologies. We watch Chuck operate within the machinery of federal prosecution; we watch Axelrod move through the parallel machinery of high finance. Each world has its own grammar, its own loyalties, its own moral universe. The screenplay’s achievement is to render both worlds with equal fluency, so that when these two men finally occupy the same scene, the collision feels genuinely charged. For writers seeking screenplay help with a dual-protagonist structure, the pilot is a model of how to build two centres of gravity that pull against each other without either one collapsing.
The dialogue deserves particular attention. Billions writes in a register that is dense, allusive, and aggressively literate — characters communicate in cultural reference, in implication, in the precise calibration of what is left unsaid. It is, in that sense, a show about people for whom language is a form of leverage. That register risks alienating an audience if it tips into self-congratulation, and the pilot navigates this by ensuring that the subtext is always legible even when the surface is opaque: we always understand the power dynamic of a scene, even when we can’t parse every reference. That is disciplined screenwriting, and it’s the kind of craft decision that benefits enormously from rigorous script analysis during development — the line between sharp and smug is thin, and easy to miss from the inside.
If you’re developing a drama built around two opposing forces of equal weight, or a world where the language itself carries the drama, a script consultant can help you evaluate whether the balance is holding and whether the register is earning its complexity. My screenwriting consultancy works with writers at every stage, from first draft to final polish. I’d love to read your work.
To find out more download the pilot script here