It may be just the distance between Hollywood and New York that has kept television from exploring the world of high finance before.
It may be the distance TV executives think–or thought–separates Middle America from Wall Street.
Or it may be the disdain that creative types–a label that would cover at least some TV writers–have for finance types.
Whatever the barrier was, though, it has come down like an airline stock after a flurry of flight cancellations.
Thanks mostly to the Internet, a creator of both easy money and cheap buzz, TV executives are now green-lighting looks at the so-called New Economy, even as it is finally being asked to adhere to some of the rules of the old economy.
Two hourlong series about the money hustle are in the new-season portfolio: One, “The Street,” from Fox for fall and the other, “Bull,” from TNT, starts Tuesday in its regular time slot (9 p.m.).
After the explosion in reality TV, now comes venality TV.
Does it work? Is greed a worthy topic for television–in a non-game show format? Is it worth watching people who have asked and answered the question about wanting to be millionaires, and are willing to sacrifice their youth and, sometimes, souls to get there?
There is nothing in these shows of the “Catch-22” hilarity of Po Bronson’s novel “Bombardiers,” which ably used absurdity to indict, indirectly but all the more deeply, financial culture. Bronson, incidentally, is on “The Street’s” writing staff, said creator Darren Star (“Sex and the City,” “Melrose Place”), but there is no evidence so far that anybody has listened to a word he said.
Nor is there, in either show, the winning dark comic tone of 1996’s short-lived Fox series “Profit,” which was about big business, but not specifically Wall Street.
But “Bull,” at least, suggests some of the perceptiveness of “Liar’s Poker,” Michael Lewis’ true-life account of greed in the 1980s, when the key letters were LBO not IPO, and the Internet was just a way for university scientists to talk to one another.
Put another way, if the two shows were stock issues and I were a broker, I’d — pssst — make this recommendation: Buy “Bull,” sell “The Street.”
Then again, if I were a broker, according to the portrayals these shows offer, I’d be wearing a tie and a telephone headset right now, I’d be picking the fittings for my future yacht, and there’s a pretty good chance I’d soon be off to have sex with another broker in a supply closet.
Actually, that crack isn’t fair to “Bull.” “The Street” looks like little more than an excuse to set a soap opera in a different milieu: Its pilot episode opens with a sex scene and makes half a dozen pretty explicit references to male anatomy. The IPOs and such are there mostly as a fallback conversation topic for a strong group of young actors, including Jennifer Connelly, Adam Goldberg and Tom Everett Scott.
But the good cast can’t stop the general air of silliness. Their characters may have Harvard MBAs, but these people behave as if “Melrose Place” were their finishing school.
But “Bull,” though it’s a name offered without a trace of irony and though it seems at first glance to be very to “The Street,” is genuinely interested in exploring the mores of the money culture. It’s worthy to wear the mantle of first original series for TNT, which has heretofore contented itself with making a passel of good to indifferent movies, especially westerns and Bible stories.
“Bull’s” creator and executive producer is Michael Chernuchin, the writer of more than 50 “Law & Order” episodes. And his show looks in its opener to have some of the same careful plotting and attention to detail that has made “L&O” a consistent performer.
It’s the story of a new financial-services firm formed when a handful of young stars break away from an industry giant. The leader of the group, known as Ditto (George Newbern), is the grandson of the old firm’s founder, played like a caricature of the crusty WASP capitalist by Donald Moffat.
That the breakaway gang is trimmer and better looking than any similar group of people you’d find on LaSalle Street does not wholly sabotage the show’s credibility. The only character with a real-life waistband is a conniving financial reporter, the only one with a real-life hairline is a financial shark played by Stanley Tucci, a fellow with potential that’s not yet fully fleshed out.
Nor is “Bull” perfectly written. There’s some inexplicable name dropping (Yoko Ono?) and speechifying about the value of making money that seem out of place, offered more for the viewers than the characters.
And there’s this line of dialogue, so gloriously mixing metaphors and dialects that it must be reproduced in full: “Risking everything for some pie-in-the-sky pipe-dream seems just a little potso to me, capiche?”
I certainly capiche the potso part, captain, eh?
But the show is genuinely interested in the process of making money, offering the kind of detail that adds texture and interest, even if you don’t completely follow the particulars of every transaction. It tries to make the office interesting, instead of just a waystation en route to the bedroom.
And, most important, it gives you rooting interest in a strong central story. The principals in the new firm, set up in rivalry with the old, go into business because they want to make their own marks–and yen, and pounds, and dollars. But they also do it because grandson doesn’t like the clubby, borderline criminal way grandpa does business.
Chernuchin makes us see these folks as good guys. “The Street,” by contrast, offers a winning character or two, but only the execution of a successful IPO and the breakup of an engagement in its first episode. Ho hum, and the sex stuff isn’t nearly as alluring as on Star’s “Sex and the City.”
There is some question as to whether these shows, like a lot of current investors, are late to the party.
But even if the market does continue to cool, most Americans are now involved in it, in one way or another, and there are still good stories to be told in people trying to keep their fortunes together.
What is certain is that TV networks do not have the patience of venture capitalists and investors in the stock market, who have been willing to finance and inflate the value of money-losing businesses just because they are losing money in the digital realm.
The motto in TV land is, “Show me the Nielsens.” It’s a cruel, cruel world, one that pays closer attention to the rules of capitalism these days than does Wall Street.
And if show quality is any predictor of success, then “Bull” is the likely winner in an already crowded TV market. What is certain is that TV networks do not have the patience of venture capitalists and investors in the stock market, who have been willing to finance and inflate the value of money-losing businesses just because they are losing money in the digital realm.
