I think it was just the third episode I finished watching last night, and quite frankly, I have to replay portions of it just to sort out the old guys who are taking Viagra and romping with younger, but certainly ambitious women. No call girls here. and no former governors. This show if it isn't about 'The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' it certainly is about the 'Rich and Influential.'
Bobby Axelrod's wife, (Axe to you fans) Lara, the frosty, blue-eyed beauty who hails from Catholic schools and that notoriously "tough" neighborhood in Manhattan, Inwood, certainly shows that she is the power behind the throne, the eminence blond who knows more people than Ray Reddington on 'The Blacklist' who owe her favors. She could lead the female chapter of Irish Mafia wives.
Through phone calls and perhaps personal sit downs, she manages to torment a partner's widow, June, from the firm whose husband bought it on 9/11. It seems this woman has written a tell-all book of post-9/11 memoirs that doesn't shed a good light on Axe Capital. It could also prove to provide certain regulatory bodies with fodder for prosecuting her husband, a basic theme of the whole show. June is basically, a woman scorned by events of the day and what floor her husband was on when lower Manhattan briefly became an airport.
Lara Axelrod, with no apparent effort at all, gets the woman's appointment at the spa cancelled, sends her country club membership and account into such "'arrears" that her tee time is wiped off the books, leaving her and her lady foursome partners stalled at the starter with their golf gloves on.
And if that's nor enough social upheaval, she also manages to derail the woman's son's admission to Stanford. The woman's son is a shoe-in with a double legacy parentage and SAT scores approaching perfect. A shoe-in until Lara calls and June is asked by the admissions officer if they've got a "safe school" in mind.
This leads to such total frustration that June breaks down in her car in a parking lot and starts pounding the steering wheel and repeatedly calling June that word that Robin Williams once said would get him thrown out of the house if he let it fly. It rhymes with runt.
Bobby Axelrod is forever reminding anyone who listens, or who he button-holes, of his Horatio Alger beginnings. This includes bringing a titan of a snack cake company to a pizza parlor where the owner has been using certain tomatoes for the sauce ever since Bobby was carrying condoms in his wallet--just in case.
Last week Bobby pisses on the very WASP family Eads when he donates enough money to put the name Axelrod on the campus plinth by having the name Eads blowtorched off. Not only does he do this by a spectacular endowment of $100 million, he fools the Eads family into thinking he's also giving them $25 million to agree to have their name removed, only to ambush them with a $16 million subtraction at the closing meeting because grandfather Eads had Bobby thrown out of the caddie shack, costing Bobby his summer job, after the senile, deaf, half-blind bugger missed a putt in front of his grandson and blamed Bobby for not telling him how to correctly play it, when Bobby clearly did tell him. Bobby lives for sweet revenge. And gets it.
And let's not forget Chuck Rhoades, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Bobby's adversary in this series. Chuck's dad Chuck Rhoades Sr. is apparently boffing a woman named Evelyn who is on the board of directors of that very snack cake company, YumTime (are they kidding with that name?) that Bobby is toying with. Bobby gets the woman thrown off the board and causes Senior there to complain to his son that his pursuit of Axelrod is now going to cost him $200,000 a year because that's what the mistress was making while on the board.
Chuck Jr., ever the sympathetic son, consoles dad that he'll survive, and he just needs some time (and several episodes, I'm sure) to achieve the take-down of Axelrod.
And just as Bobby likes to rub people's faces in doo, Chuck there upbraids a fellow dog walker on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade who doesn't pick up after his dog. Jesus, what a speech on being a citizen! Full oratory powers lead to the offending dog owner to pick up the poop with his bare hands.
Chuck, his wife Wendy, and their children apparently live in the Brooklyn Heights area, as a good many of the people who populate the corridors of Downtown Manhattan power do. Wendy and Chuck are a power couple. In addition to Wendy being an in-house psychologist and motivational coach at Axe Capital and a colleague of Bobby, she is versed in being a dominatrix.
Thus, we get a session with Axe Capital's No. 2 man, Mike "Wags" Wagner who broadens my knowledge of what ATM stands for. Up until yesterday I fully thought it stood for Automatic Teller Machine, and I really couldn't understand why Wags these asks Wendy if she knows what ATM is.
Well, being a certified wife/dominatrix to Paul Giamatti's character, yes, she does know what ATM stands for outside of the machine found in bank lobbies.
This at-home activity of hers with hubby gave us the putting-out-the-fire scene of the show's opening episode, to now a bedroom view of Chuck just not that into being tied up, gagged, and poked with an electric cattle prod to the point that Wendy retreats to the bathroom, hoping he'll redirect his mind and get more into it. While waiting, she sits on the throne and gets on the cell phone and invests $250,000 of her money into a hedge fund account just started by a former female trader at Axe Capital who has recently gone over to another side.
An outside view of their Brooklyn dwelling gives you the sense that there are many floors in that townhouse/brownstone, so therefore there must be some solid doors that lock that will keep the kids out from surprising mom and dad as mom is bossing dad around in her black underwear. Without those precautions, those kids are going to need counseling of their own.
The show is 'Peyton Place' with a hedge fund replacing the hospital.
I bet that dog walker that now picks up after his dog wishes he knew about the U.S. Attorney's sexual proclivities, even if they are administered by his wife.
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