Billions: Showtime Series Creators on Axe’s Return and the WGA Strike’s Impact on the Finale

(Photo: Cara Howe/Showtime)

Billions is ending its run on Showtime this weekend, and the men behind the series – Brian Koppelman and David Levien – are revealing some behind-the-scenes details about the financial drama’s final season and series finale.

Starring Paul Giamatti, Corey Stoll, Maggie Siff, Damian Lewis, David Costabile, Asia Kate Dillon, Dola Rashad, Jeffrey DeMunn, Sakina Jaffrey, Daniel Breaker, and Toney Goins, the series is set in the financial district of New York City.

Season seven saw the return of Lewis as Bobby Axelrod after a season away. Co-creator Levien said the following about Lewis’ return to Billions:

“We’ve known for a couple of years that he was going to leave the show. At that time, he said, ‘I’ll come back in the final season for a couple episodes as long as you guys have something good to do.’ So we knew that was gonna happen. But then as we got closer, we started talking about what we were thinking he said, ‘You know, I think I can do more.’”

Co-creator Koppelman revealed that the WGA strike had a personal impact on the series’ finale. The episode had been written but was yet to be filmed when the strike began. Koppelman said the following, per Deadline:

“We were not able to be part of the filming of the last episode. Luckily, we’d written the whole thing. It was fully locked and finished, but we couldn’t table read the last episode. We were really lucky that the director of the final episode is Neil Burger. Neil directed the pilot of Billions, the second episode of Billions, and several others. When we came back from the pandemic he stepped in because we wanted someone who really knew [the show]. Neil has the DNA of the show so even though we couldn’t be there, Neil and a non-writing producer named Mike Harrop were able to handle it.”

Levian added:

“We could hear how it was going but we couldn’t get calls from set asking us to do things about the script. We couldn’t write ADR, we weren’t an ADR heavy show and we always thought that if it ended before we finished and locked that we could, you know, do some stuff but we didn’t really need to at the end. … Before it all happened we were able to have this big cast dinner one night and it was great. We got to say goodbye, everybody made speeches, and we were able to tell them what it all meant to us. That was like our emotional closure because we knew what was coming.”

Though the original Billions is over, Showtime still has multiple Billions spin-offs in development. It’s unknown if any characters from the original series will be part of the new shows.

What do you think? Are you happy with how Billions ended? Did you want to see more of this Showtime series or, was it time to end it?