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Most food on television is like this. Instead of offering something remotely edible, meals are often shoehorned into plotlines as a last ditch effort to ground the characters in some sense of reality. Real people have to eat, so characters should have to pretend to eat too. The reasoning is why it’s all too common to see actors in breakfast scenes hovering over full plates of Belgian waffles, eggs and crisp bacon like flying drones.

“Why don’t they eat any of it?” you ask yourself. Because, as it turns out, the food is disgusting.

This never happens on Billions, though.

Photo by Jeff Neumann/SHOWTIME

The show, which stars Damien Lewis as billionaire hedge-fund manager Robert “Bobby” Axelrod and Paul Giamatti as U.S. Attorney General Charles “Chuck” Rhoades Jr., revolves around the two leads battling it out in a legal cat-and-mouse game, as the attorney general tries to prosecute the fund manager for white-collar crimes. But while co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien did not set out to create a food show, they’ve employed food as a central character throughout the show’s three seasons.

The characters on Billions love to eat. When we first meet Bobby Axelrod, he is spending his morning indulging in two slices of cheese pizza at his favourite no-frills childhood pizzeria. It’s the same pizza that he got for free when he couldn’t afford a slice as a child, and it seems to make him happier than any billion-dollar trade. He offers to partner with the owner, who is being pushed out of the neighbourhood by rising rents, saying he’ll cover the overages himself so that the pizzeria can stay in business.