The first season of Billions premiered in January 2016— eight years after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and eleven months before a self-proclaimed billionaire was elected president. This was the sweet spot, timingwise, for a bombastic prestige drama about the world of money. In 2011, the sharp and enraging documentary Inside Job, which charted the corruption that led to the financial crisis, won an Oscar. In the winter of 2016, The Big Short—a sermonizing, big-budget Hollywood comedy about reckless bankers—was nominated for Best Picture. The mea culpas had been issued, the bad actors identified, and although only one person officially went to jail, the coast looked clear for new stories of Wall Street and wealth.

Of course, in the wake of the crisis, a showrunner could not simply rehash the old Gordon Gekko formula for a modern audience. Slickness was no longer glamorous but gross; very few Americans had an appetite for captains of industry slurping down midday martinis at the Capital Grille. Instead, the three creators of Billions—the longtime writing team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien, along with The New York Times’ financial reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin—took a populist genre and grafted it onto the honeyed, moneyed lives of the rich and infamous: They made a superhero show about finance.

Billions has much more in common with a classic DC movie than it does with Boiler Room. It features two outsize, magniloquent protagonists who are constant foils to one another: light and dark, good and evil, both cut from the same ambitious cloth and therefore destined to lock in an endless pas de deux of power. The show is forever switching which of these two men has the upper hand, on both a moral and tactical level, so that rigid definitions of right and wrong no longer apply. In the high-stakes world of big business and its regulation, you are only as good as your last deal or as the last dealmaker you put in jail. In the pursuit of those enormous goals, ethics can easily get muddled.

On the surface, Chuck Rhoades Jr. (Paul Giamatti)—the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York—should have the noble advantage over Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), a billionaire hedge-fund mogul who made a fortune on September 11 by shorting aviation and shipping stocks between the two tower hits. Axelrod’s bet, while technically legal, seemed all the more dishonorable since he was himself working out of the World Trade Center at the time. He didn’t show up the morning of the attacks only because he was being let go, after his shady investment strategies had been discovered. And yet, in the world of Billions, things are never exactly what they seem. Axelrod also uses his fortune to provide for the families of his dead colleagues (without granting even one interview about this to the press), to form philanthropic foundations, to dole out thick donations to the NYPD and FDNY.

Axe (the show often shortens his name) is pure new money, having grown up poor in Yonkers, taking on a paper route at eleven years old. Chuck, on the other hand, is part of a New York dynasty, a Yalie with a power-player dad and a blind trust fund. He commands the strong arm of the law, backed by every advantage in life. His privilege has meant he is accustomed to victory, so he does whatever it takes to maintain his winning hand, including orchestrating illegal machinations from behind the scenes. His dream is to become the governor of New York and also to put Bobby Axelrod in jail. One achievement will clinch the other, or so he thinks, and he pursues both with a ruthlessness that only Lady Macbeth could comprehend.