But rather than delivering a short, sharp shock to the self-satisfied mortgage barons, Marty's team explains that America hates the company and then outlines a plan for MetroCapital to lie its0 way to a better reputation. He offers up a "mortgage amnesty" program that, after disqualifications, will actually help very few struggling homeowners but will let the company stave off enough criticism to keep their bonuses. Rarely have corporate priorities been so clearly articulated.

After the assignment at MetroCapital, Greg Norbert appears again, this time to set into motion the season's major plot arc: MetroCapital's attempt to acquire the firm Marty and his team work for so the mortgage company can have in-house consultants rather than hiring outsiders. "After you left, we felt sad," Greg tells Marty, who had hoped not to see Greg again after a sublimely awkward business dinner. "No, not really. But we had all this bailout money." That last line sums up one of the most off-putting things about the economic crisis and recovery we've been living through since 2008: The people substantially responsible for our current peril ended up with a lot of money and remain unrepentant.

If only the show would keep its consultants focused on cases like MetroCapital's to expose the rot in the American economy. They could easily take on a financial services firm trying to avoid a Lehman-like fate, a payday lender, or an outrageously abusive CEO like former Massey Energy boss Don Blakenship. Unfortunately, House of Lies keeps veering off into extracurricular hijinks, perpetuating in a tiresome misconception that's becoming increasingly common on cable: the idea that naughtiness is inherently interesting. Surely by now no one is surprised that Midwesterners, too, have sex dungeons and foot fetishes, or that self-professed masters of the universe sleep with a lot of women. It was vastly more entertaining to watch Ben Schwartz chastely profess admiration for Leslie Knope as wannabe small-town operator Jean Ralphio on Parks and Recreation than to sit through a scene of him contemplating anal sex with a saucy Mormon chick as he does on House of Lies. The network show may be tamer than the cable one, but it's more clever and winning. And it was much more revelatory to watch Damian Lewis and Claire Danes's damaged victims of the War on Terror make love sober for the first time on fellow Showtime program Homeland than it is to see House of Lies' Marty bring a stripper to a business dinner, only to have her hook up with Marty's client's wife in the ladies room.

That's not to say that the show fails entirely when it comes to its characters' personal lives. One of the best parts of House of Lies is what Marty comes home to. It's refreshing to see a household made up of three generations of black men, rather than a standard contingent of matriarchs. From the first scene of Marty's family life, it's clear that he, his father, and his son are all characters rather than tropes. His retired therapist father struggles with the memory of Marty's mother's suicide and helps raise Roscoe, Marty's son, who prefers to dress in girl's clothes and tries out for Sandy in the school's production of Grease (though it's not yet clear if he's gay). House of Lies is admirably unafraid to present Marty as something more subtle and intriguing than a fully supportive father. Like Burt Hummel on Glee, Marty struggles to understand what Roscoe is going through. The pain on his face when Roscoe asks him "Hey dad, what's a fudgepacker?"—the boy wanting to know what the term means before admitting he's been called it—is hard to witness.