All The Chess Pieces Are On The Move In Season 4 Of 'Billions'

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. W.S. Merwin, who was appointed poet laureate of the United States in 2010, died last Friday at age 91. When he won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005, the judges' citation read, quote, "Merwin's poems speak from a lifelong belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection," unquote.

Merwin was born in 1927, the son of a Presbyterian minister. When he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, he was best known for his poems against the war in Vietnam. He won his second Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Terry Gross spoke with W.S. Merwin in 2008, when he had just published a new collection of poems. It was titled "The Shadow Of Sirius" and was about memory and mortality. They started with one of his poems from that collection, called "A Likeness."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

W S MERWIN: (Reading) Almost to your birthday, and as I am getting dressed alone in the house, a button comes off. And once I find a needle with an eye big enough for me to try to thread it, and at last have sewed the button on. I open an old picture of you, who always did such things by magic - one photograph, found after you died, of you at 20, beautiful in a way I would never see, for that was nine years before I was born. But the picture has faded suddenly, spots have marred it. Maybe it is past repair. I have only what I remember.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: I love that last line, I have only what I remember, that you have this photograph of your mother. I assume it's your mother.

MERWIN: Yes.

GROSS: And the photograph is marred, and you only have what you remember. You know, memory is always such an issue for me. You know, do you struggle to chronicle your life, to keep the photographs, to document it, to keep journals, to hold onto all the memories? Or do you accept that you have only what you remember?

MERWIN: I think we do both. I think we always do both. I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past. The present is an absolutely transparent moment that only great saints ever see occasionally.

But the present - what we think of as the present - is made up of the past. And the past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw. But the - those moments themselves bring up the feelings that were - that we had forgotten we had. And it's all memory.

So I think - I don't - I think the idea that memory is somehow sentimental or nostalgic - nostalgia itself is - the etymology of nostalgia is homecoming. And homecoming is what we all believe in. I mean, if we didn't believe in homecoming, we wouldn't be able to bear the day.

GROSS: As you get older, do you spend more time thinking about your early memories, your childhood, your formative years?

MERWIN: I do. You know, I didn't like my years in Scranton, Pa., particularly. They were very important. They were from the age of 9 to the age of about 14. And then I find that the props, the scenes, the light, all sorts of things from there come back with an increasing reality, an increasing freshness that they probably didn't even have for me at the time or that I didn't notice at the time.

And this is true of different periods of my life. And I think this happens to everybody. I think this is one of the benefits of getting older, that one has that perspective on things farther away. One is so caught up in middle years in the idea of accomplishing something when, in fact, the full accomplishment is always with one.

GROSS: My guest is poet W.S. Merwin, and he has a new collection of poems called "The Shadow of Sirius."

Several of the poems in your book are about your parents. This is one of them. It's called "A Single Autumn." Would you introduce it for us and read it?

MERWIN: Yes. This is something I think I've thought about quite often, and why - my parents died very close together. I thought they weren't very close together. But actually, they - one of their great gifts to me was that neither of them turned out to be afraid of dying at all. And in quite different ways, they died without any expression of anxiety or of dread or of clutching at anything else.

And that's a great gift to be given, that feeling of no fear. And I think I inherited it from them very early. And - but after they - after my mother died - I was away in Europe when she died. And when I came back, the original - the first funeral had - it was already over. And I moved right into the house, against the advice of many friends, and spent something like a month or six weeks there and giving away their belongings to their friends and getting to know their friends and then finally, giving away the furniture things to my sister and being there in a totally empty house before I just left it and went back to New York.

And this is about that time of being alone in that empty house, when if it hit me hard, I was all by myself, and it didn't matter. And if it didn't, I went through all of the feelings and no feelings that one has at that time, noticing that, you know, that there were many things that we would never - it's a conversation that we would never finish.

And so this is a poem about that called "A Single Autumn." (Reading) The year my parents died - one that summer, one that fall, three months and three days apart - I moved into the house where they had lived their last years. It had never been theirs and was still theirs, in that way, for a while. Echoes in every room without a sound, all the things that we had never been able to say, I could not remember. Doll collection in a China cabinet, plates stacked on shelves, lace on drop leaf tables, a dried branch of bittersweet before a hall mirror were all planning to wait. The glass door of the house remained closed. The days had turned cold. And out in the tall hickories, the blaze of autumn had begun on its own. I could do anything.

GROSS: God, I love that last line (laughter) - I could do anything. And I think - what were some of the things that you wouldn't have done when your parents were alive, living in that house?

MERWIN: Well, you know, all the inhibitions one has with parents. And my father was a very - when he was younger, was a very repressive, capricious, punitive, incomprehensible, distant person. And I've freed myself from that as, insofar as one ever frees oneself any such influence, fairly early.

But one was always aware of the things that would trouble either of them. And all of those things were gone. I mean, I could say or do or think or go or meet or talk to anything, anybody, the way I wanted to. I was as free there as I was anywhere in the world. And it was a sort of desolate freedom, of course (laughter).

GROSS: When you were going through your parent's possessions and figuring out what to give away, what you keep, what to throw away, what did you decide to keep?

MERWIN: Not very much. My father was a minister, and he asked me to burn all his sermons. That was - I mean, they were terrible sermons (laughter) - but I felt...

GROSS: Well, what made them terrible? Why do you describe them as terrible?

MERWIN: Oh, he never finished his sentence, you know, and they were...

GROSS: Well, you never - you never even have periods in your poems (laughter). That's really funny.

MERWIN: Yeah. No, but these were all dashes, like Emily Dickinson. And they were - there was - they were very unoriginal. They - you know, and he just obviously didn't want them kept.

GROSS: Did you want to keep him for yourself, or did you...

MERWIN: I kept...

GROSS: ...Obey the wishes?

MERWIN: I did want to keep some. And I wanted to keep various correspondences that my mother had there that were marked Burn This. So I burned them. And you know, it's at that moment, you are very eager to do what they wanted you to. But I kept strange things.

I kept things that my mother was growing in the garden. I potted them up and took them back to the apartment and grew them in New York. Oh, one or two last bits of clothing that were hanging in the closet - very little, you know? They weren't people who had much money, and there was nothing of great value there and all odds and ends. A few small things from my grandfather - I mean, the penknife from my grandfather - little tiny things like that that would've made - meant nothing to anybody else.

And - oh, the other thing that I kept from the house - I gave my sister all the furniture that we - we divided everything up quite equitably. And I kept all of the papers. So there were diaries and day books and account books and all sorts of stuffs that I used later.

GROSS: When you say used, you mean used in poems.

MERWIN: Yes, used in poems and used in trying to - in writing "Unframed Originals" and - oh, her - she was an orphan. It was her - her father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he had passes for all of the railroads that existed in the very beginning of the 20th century and that had ceased to exist. It was wonderful taking out his book of passes and seeing all the - all of the nonexistent railroads that he could ride free on (laughter).

GROSS: That sounds wonderful. So you still have that.

MERWIN: Oh, yeah. I still have them, yes.

BIANCULLI: The late poet W.S. Merwin speaking to Terry Gross in 2008 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GAIA WILMER OCTET'S "MIGRATIONS")

BIANCULLI: Let's return to Terry's 2008 interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin. He died last Friday at age 91.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: Your father was a minister. What were you taught about God? What did you believe about God when you were young?

MERWIN: Oh, I had to learn the catechism and - but it was mostly proscriptive and - things you couldn't do. We - there was no card-playing in the house and no dancing and not much of anything that was fun. And it gradually - that gradually all shelled off. He got better about it as I got older.

Then he became a chaplain in the Second World War, went overseas. And so in my early adolescence, I was freed of all of that and managed to sort of get along with him much better in later years. But he was pretty remote. He didn't know how to be a father.

GROSS: Did he know that you became a poet? And what did - did he think poetry was frivolous?

MERWIN: No, he didn't. He thought it was fun. And when I felt that I was, in effect, a pacifist at the end of World War II and I was put in the psycho ward in the Chelsea Naval Hospital...

GROSS: You were?

MERWIN: I was, yeah.

GROSS: You were put in the mental ward for being a pacifist.

MERWIN: Yeah, because I had enlisted, you see, when I was 17. And all of these - all of this cogitation about it had come later. And I finally asked to be put in the brig because I said I'd made a terrible mistake, and I should never have enlisted. I don't really believe in what we're doing.

And so I was instead put in the psycho ward, and I was pretty lucky, I guess. But he came to the Chelsea Hospital and talked to the chaplain there and came to see me as a visitor and said, you must follow your own convictions. And I thought, that's pretty good, you know? He's never said that before (laughter).

GROSS: What year was this that you were put in the psycho ward?

MERWIN: Oh, when was it? '46, I guess.

GROSS: So what was your treatment?

MERWIN: Oh, it was - they tried to scare me, I guess, but it was - otherwise, it was basically rather humane. I was locked up. I was in a big ward, and there were some people who had real trouble - I mean, hallucinations and DTs from alcoholism and brain damage from active duty and - all mixed in together. I made some good friends there in the ward whom I never saw again.

GROSS: Did being locked up in a psychiatric ward make you question your own sanity? Were you able to be confident the whole time that you were locked up under false pretenses and you were perfectly sane - you were just dissenting?

MERWIN: Oh, I realized that it was because of dissenting. But I didn't question - I mean, the more I thought about - I thought, I can't allow myself to be trained to kill on orders, to take life on orders. I mean, I really took the idea of not killing seriously. And I thought, whatever I'm told, killing is still my responsibility if I do it. I can't say it's because I was ordered to because I know I don't really believe that. I don't believe I would kill on orders. I don't believe I would take life because somebody told me to.

And these are people who are doing it for reasons of their own and for reasons, some of which I don't know. And these - and the people I'm supposed to kill are people whom I don't know. I can imagine circumstances in which I might do it.

I can imagine being in the resistance or something like that where I would do it, but it would be extreme circumstances with - in which I could feel that I was taking that responsibility on myself, just as we do when we kill a mosquito or an ant. I don't think we have a right to take life - any life. I think we'd take it knowing that we do and knowing that we have no right to do it, and we're responsible for it.

GROSS: I don't know how you feel about talking about this, but how do you feel about getting older? You're in your early 80s now and dealing with the dimming of some of the senses in a body that isn't as strong as it was. I don't know if you have a lot of pain or - you know, physical elements associated with that, but you have to accept a certain amount of physical diminishment as you age. How are you at accepting that or dealing with it?

MERWIN: The one thing so far that I find a little difficult is that my - having always had wonderful eyes, my eyes aren't as good as they used to be. And so I have to get used to that. But I have a great guide in this matter. I had a magnificent creature, an incredible character, a black Chow who, at the age of 8, went blind - totally blind. And you had to tell people about that because she always knew everything.

And she would guide me if the light got - if I was out somewhere. I was taking her for a walk and forgot a flashlight, and it got dark. She'd take me home. And I thought, you know, the way she confronted absolutely everything without fear, without panic, without anything of the kind, this is one of the great guiding spirits of my life.

And so as my eyes get worse, I think of Muku more and more often. And that's a very pleasant thing to do because I think, how would Muku have dealt with this situation? And you know very well how she would have done it (laughter).

GROSS: So how long ago was she your dog?

MERWIN: Oh, she died four years ago.

GROSS: Is this the dog you refer to as a dog grief (laughter) in one of your poems?

MERWIN: She was one of them.

GROSS: Yeah.

MERWIN: Yes. There were two of them who died very close together.

GROSS: Right. Right. We have time for one more poem. And I'd like to ask you to close with a poem called "Rain Light" - if you can introduce it for us first.

MERWIN: I shall. It's, again, a poem in the third - in the last section of the book. And it's about - what is it about? It's about the very thing you were talking about. I mean, how - what happens as you face the fact that the entire world is slipping, literally dissolving around you, around us?

You know, we have that feeling about our civilization, about our species and everything else. It's all endangered. And, indeed, it is. And we either face that as a recognition, as that's our moment, or we sort of groan and dread it, which is a waste of time. But this is not a rational poem at all. It's called "Rain Light" - the early, early morning rain, which is something that I love very much.

(Reading) All day the stars watch from long ago. My mother said, I am going now. When you are alone, you will be all right. Whether or not you know, you will know. Look at the old house in the dawn rain. All the flowers are forms of water. The sun reminds them through a white cloud, touches the patchwork spread on the hill, the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born. See how they wake without a question, even though the whole world is burning.

GROSS: W.S. Merwin, thank you so much for talking with us and for reading some of your poems. Thank you.

MERWIN: Thank you, Terry.

BIANCULLI: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin, speaking with Terry Gross in 2008. He died last Friday at age 91. After a break, we'll listen back to another archive interview with surf rock guitarist Dick Dale, who died Saturday at age 81. Also, Justin Chang will review Jordan Peele's new horror film "Us." And I'll review the new season of "Billions," Showtime's drama series about Wall Street greed and ambition. I'm David Bianculli. And this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF STEFON HARRIS' "FROM THE QUEEN SUITE: THE SINGLE PETAL OF A ROSE")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DICK DALE'S "BANZAI WASHOUT")

DICK DALE: Guitar Player magazine once asked me, who is your influence? And I said Hank Williams. And they said Hank Williams doesn't play electric guitar. And but that's who it was. And music to me is like a facet in my life. I love many things. I've trained lions and tigers for - raised them for 30 years.

And I've been in the martial arts for 30 years, been flying airplanes and just doing so many things that are very interesting. And music was just one of them. And I was raised actually listening to the big band era - you know, like Guy Lombardo, Harry James. And the first person that I really listened to was Gene Krupa on drums, and that's where I get this heavy staccato drumming effect on playing.

Like Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac once said to me - watching me - said, my God. He says, you play - you're the most percussive guitarist I've ever seen in my life. You look like you're playing drums. And I do. I'm playing all the different parts of the drums when I play my guitar. So actually, drums was my first, and Gene Krupa was my first big influence.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Some of the surf music stars didn't really surf - most notably the Beach Boys - but you did. You actually did surf. Is there a connection between the sounds that you'd hear surfing and the kind of music you were playing?

DALE: Yes. Actually, the sounds were actually compared to, actually, my lions and tigers. And the ocean - the power of my tigers and the power of the ocean - when I would get, you know, thrown across a cage, you know, with one blow or seeing the cat go, with 2,200 pounds per square inch, bite through a stainless steel pan, and you just marvel that man cannot control that.

And then you get out in a wave. And then you get out and you start paddling, and you're facing a six-footer or an eight-footer and - let alone a 10-footer. It is the most frightening thing in the world, and you just have to just dig down and go for it. And then when you get sucked up and taken over, you never feel strength like that in your life. And you just can't stop that power, so you must ride with it.

And that's when I learned to really go with the flow of everything in life. And the waves did create my feelings of that sound, that (imitating guitar). It was like the lip of a wave coming over the top of my head. I'd stick my finger in the wall and get my ear up as close as I could, getting in a tube or - then doing a bottom turn and missing it and getting sucked up over the top and being just crunched right through your board. And in those days, we used the big 10-footers, you know.

GROSS: Did the sound of the ocean make you want to get that loud, amplified sound that you wanted?

DALE: Yeah, it was - it's a combination of the ocean and the roar of my tigers and lions, and just putting it all together, that force. And the ocean just has the two sounds. It has the one that comes over the top of your head - it's a lazy sound - and then it has that bottom rumbling sound, and then it has that wipeout sound.

And with my big 60-gauge strings - like, most guitar players are using sevens and eights and nines - the Slinkies (ph), you know, and 10s. My thinnest string is a 14 unwound, and then I use two 18 unwounds for my second and third string. And then my fourth string, I use a 38 wound. And my fifth, I use a 48. And then I use a 58 or a 60, whichever ones I can get.

GROSS: So this is, like, really thick strings you're using. And that gives it a deeper sound?

DALE: Yeah, it gives it a big - Joel Sullivan calls them bridge cables.

GROSS: (Laughter).

DALE: It gives you a real, real, fat, thick, thick sound, along with a combination of what goes into this amplifier and the guitar and the speaker. It's a combination of everything. But playing them is very hard. It's very painful because it's like sticking - taking your finger and going up and down, you know, the sidewalk with it.

(LAUGHTER)

DALE: That's why when I make faces, everybody goes, oh, man, you make the neatest faces. I go, that's pain. That's not...

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: What about the picking style that you developed?

DALE: The picking came from my parents - my father's side of the family, his grandparents - his mother and father were born in Beirut, Lebanon. And my mother's side of the family were born in Poland. So they - I was subject to the musical styles of both countries.

But when I had that influence of that Arabic music - when I came to California, a kid asked me - he said, can you play on one string? Because I was playing what I called rockabilly. And I developed a ruck-a-tuck style of strumming on the guitar because I didn't have a whole band. So I would go (imitating guitar).

So now, when I did that, this little boy - he was probably about 10. And at my first show at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa - that's when it opened up. We had, like, 17 surfers. And the kids I was surfing with - and he says, can you play on one string? And I didn't know what to do. And I said, well, come back tomorrow night, and I'll have something for you - just to get rid of him.

And then when I went home, I said, oh, my God. I'm going to get caught. I'm going to be found out that I'm a fake, you know, that I can't play on one string or something. And I thought, and I said, "Misirlou." And "Misirlou" is played very slowly. I went and quadrupled the sound.

I went (imitating guitar) because I wanted a machine gun, staccato picking style, which is very difficult to play because you have to keep your meter properly. And then, as a result, you break stainless steel strings, and you melt picks down - like, two or three of them in a song, they melt.

And that's why I have a special pick holder that - I reach down and I throw one out when I play, and I pick one up and I continue melting. But that's how I get that sound. It's like a machine gun style - picking style.

GROSS: Let's hear your original recording of "Misirlou," which you made back in 1962.

DALE: Yeah, I think the original people that did it are probably turning over in their grave when they heard it the way I play it.

GROSS: (Laughter).

(SOUNDBITE OF DICK DALE'S "MISIRLOU")

GROSS: What was the scene like on the beach when you started surfing and playing?

DALE: We would start - we would go down to the beach at 5 o'clock in the morning to get the early glass off and build a fire to keep warm. We never had wetsuits at that time, so we froze in the water. We'd - our legs would turn blue. We'd beat on our legs to stop the pain. And we just hoped that the next wave - you know, waiting for the next wave, and you'd just beat on our thighs, you know, just to keep the pain from going away.

It was just that everybody had a camaraderie about them. And basically, in California, everyone that went to a Dick Dale dance - you know, we all met at the beach. And we would all surf. And we'd just surf all day, come out of the water, break and have a sandwich, and go back in and surf to the evening glass offs.

GROSS: When you started playing, you wanted a really loud sound and you couldn't get it loud enough, and you knew Leo Fender, the guitar maker, and - what? - you worked together to get an amplifier that would give you the volume you wanted?

DALE: Well, what happened was it wasn't as much as volume. What it was was a quality of sound. I wanted to get a fat, thick, deep sound that was very fat, sounding like a big floor tom - a tom-tom - and because, once again, listening to the Gene Krupa drumming. And when - we never miked our amplifiers, we never had mikes in front of amplifiers. So the amplifier had to sound thick and pure on its own merit.

And with Leo making just amplifiers that are only 10-inch speakers, you cannot get a sound out of a 10-inch speaker that gives you a fat, thick sound. So when Leo Fender would call me to come to his factory, he said, Dick, I've got it. I've got the sound. I'd go up there and I'd play this amplifier that he'd have. And it would be really loud, you know, and really powerful. And I'd go, wow, that sounds great.

But then when I took it to the Rendezvous Ballroom and got it on the stage, and there's 4,000 people out there, all of a sudden their clothes would suck up the sound and suck up the thickness and the baseness of this sound. And I wouldn't have any more power or any more depth of sound.

So I kept trying to tell Leo that, and we kept on making all these adjustments with output transformers, with speakers. And that's how I blew up over 48 speakers and amplifiers, they'd catch on fire. The speakers would freeze, the speakers would tear from the coils. We went to Lansing Company and said, listen. We need a beefier speaker that'll handle the big-bass strings, that will handle this output transformer.

And then Leo finally came to - and Freddie Tavares - came to the Renzezvous, stood in the middle of 4,000 people to watch what I was doing, and they looked at each other and they said, now I know what Dick's trying to tell me.

So he went back to the drawing board, came up and invented the Dick Dale Showman amplifier and the Dual Showman amplifier, with the 15-inch Lansing speaker. That was the end result of the sound, and along with the creations that we did on the Stratocaster guitar, making it a real thick body because the thicker the wood, the more purer the sound.

BIANCULLI: Surf rock guitarist Dick Dale speaking to Terry Gross in 1993. He died last Saturday at age 81. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the newest horror film from Jordan Peele called "Us." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DICK DALE'S "HAVA NAGILA")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli in for Terry Gross. The Showtime drama series "Billions," starring Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis, began its fourth season this week. It's a drama about state and federal politicians and prosecutors and manipulative Wall Street billionaires. I usually don't return to TV series this far into their runs, but there are two reasons in particular to give "Billions" another look and another helping of praise.

One is that because of events in the real world since the series was launched in the election year of 2016, "Billions" has become almost astoundingly relevant. Its main characters and conflicts include prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, opportunistic and wealthy power players and even media-dominating lawyers and powerful Russian oligarchs. That's one reason.

The other reason is that the writing, the acting and the directing on "Billions," all of which started at a very high level, have gotten even better each season. And for Season 4, all the chess pieces are being moved around. Former foes are now allies. Formerly tight relationships are now shaken to the core. And new players keep being introduced, adding even more fire and explosiveness to the mix.

There's an exciting byproduct to all this change. Paul Giamatti from HBO's "John Adams" plays Chuck Rhoades, a former federal prosecutor who's now running for state attorney general. Damian Lewis from Showtime's "Homeland" plays Bobby Axelrod, the Wall Street tycoon whom Rhoades spent years investigating and prosecuting.

But now they're on the same side, which means these two powerhouse actors get to share many more scenes. And Maggie Siff, Maggie Siff, who plays Chuck's wife, Wendy, and a psychological counselor to Axelrod and his firm, finally gets to take center stage as the new season unfurls. Her husband's campaign for attorney general is proceeding nicely.

But this season, a rival politician blackmails Chuck into dropping out of the race, or he'll release some potentially damaging personal information, namely that Chuck and his wife privately engage in sadomasochistic sex play with her as the dominant. Initially Chuck is willing to risk that public disclosure but not Wendy.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW "BILLIONS")

MAGGIE SIFF: (As Wendy Rhoades) And don't forget part of you wants the humiliation, needs it. But I don't. I can't live with it. I won't live it. We cannot take the chance that Foley is serious.

PAUL GIAMATTI: (As Charles Rhoades) Oh, he's serious.

SIFF: (As Wendy Rhoades) Then that's it, Chuck.

GIAMATTI: (As Charles Rhoades) And that you can live with - me just capitulating in silence.

SIFF: (AS Wendy Rhoades) I can, and so can you. You have to. Walk away.

GIAMATTI: (As Charles Rhoades) I just want to scream, Wend.

SIFF: (As Wendy Rhoades) At the situation or at me?

GIAMATTI: (As Charles Rhoades) Yes.

SIFF: (As Wendy Rhoades) I know. And if you need to do that to move on, then do it. But then sure as [expletive] move on.

BIANCULLI: It seems like everywhere Chuck turns this season, he's up against another problem, another threat, another powerful person. John Malkovich in a recurring role as a Russian oligarch is one of them and seems to get more sinister the quieter he speaks. Even when Chuck threatens to expel him from the country, Malkovich's Grigor seems to maintain a lot of the power.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW "BILLIONS")

JOHN MALKOVICH: (As Grigor Andolov) There are so many ways we could have met. It is unfortunate you chose this one.

GIAMATTI: (As Charles Rhoades) Like the musician says of the piece he plays, it chose me.

MALKOVICH: (As Grigor Andolov) Did it? Or are you doing favors for friends on the high - because you must know that I am higher than any other friend you could imagine, and my friends are higher still.

GIAMATTI: (As Charles Rhoades) That notwithstanding, your business interests have been connected with blacklisted governments, and the paperwork is prepared to have you declared an unregistered foreign agent with intent against ours. There's only one choice that will preclude that - you firing up your private samolyot and flying home or wherever else it is you call home.

BIANCULLI: Almost everywhere you turn on "Billions," there are colorful characters, intense conflicts and captivating performances. Watch in particular this season for Asia Kate Dillon as Taylor Mason, a former protege of Axelrod's who's now a Wall Street rival. And new arrival Nina Arianda, the wonderful actress from Broadway's "Venus In Fur," as Rebecca, yet another confident, commanding Wall Street player.

Yet "Billions," now four seasons in, has yet to be noticed at all by the Emmy voters. Forget wins. The show and its dynamic lead and supporting and guest actors have never even been nominated. Given the overall excellence of "Billions," which was created by Brian Koppelman, and David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin, that's a TV travesty. But it's a travesty with a long tradition of great shows all but ignored by the TV Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Remember Tom Fontana's groundbreaking HBO prison drama "Oz" - amazing acting throughout, yet it received only one nomination for guest actor. FX's "The Shield" - star Michael Chiklis was nominated only the first year even though he won, and his brilliant co-star, Walton Goggins, was never even nominated. In HBO's Western "Deadwood," Ian McShane was nominated only once, and so many other great actors, including Timothy Olyphant, never even got a nod.

And both Olyphant and Goggins were ignored for their work in FX's "Justified" though some guest actors won Emmys. So the voters were watching just not paying attention. HBO is bringing "Deadwood" back as a movie in May, so that's exciting news. But "Billions" shouldn't have to wait for a revival to get its due. Like those other series I just mentioned, "Billions" is television at its best. Attention must be paid.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MISIRILOU")

DICK DALE: (Vocalizing).

BIANCULLI: Coming up - a tribute to Dick Dale, the creator of the surf rock guitar sound who died last Saturday at age 81. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAN AUERBACH SONG, "HEARTBROKEN, IN DISREPAIR")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Jordan Peele has been busy since his feature film debut, "Get Out," which won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His upcoming projects include a new streaming series based on "The Twilight Zone," premiering next month. He is the executive producer, as well as host and narrator. But for now, he has a new horror picture in theaters called "Us," which stars Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke as a couple on vacation with their kids. Film critic Justin Chang has this review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: "Get Out" was the definition of a hard act to follow - a critically adored, Oscar-winning smash hit that announced the actor and comedian Jordan Peele as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. It was also a searingly confrontational movie about the horrors of being black in America - a thriller that turned white liberal racism into the most insidious of boogeymen.

The smart and relentlessly scary new thriller "Us" doesn't have anything quite that conceptually audacious up its sleeve, and that's a good thing. Peele isn't interested in repeating himself, and race, while hardly irrelevant here, isn't the chief source of tension this time around. His most radical gesture is to place an African-American family at the center of the action, with a matter-of-factness that we don't see enough of in mainstream movies.

Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke, who shared a few scenes as fellow Wakandans in "Black Panther," here play a married couple named Adelaide and Gabe Wilson. They're on summer vacation with their kids, Zora and Jason, in Santa Cruz, Calif., where they have a lakeside rental home and a beautiful beach just a few miles away.

But something about that beach frightens Adelaide, triggering flashbacks to a strange, startling encounter she had there as a young girl in 1986, which left her traumatized for months afterward. What exactly happened to Adelaide, and why is that coming back to haunt her now, more than 30 years later? We'll find out soon enough.

"Us" is a return of the repressed movie and a scary doppelganger movie. It's like a George Romero zombie freak-out crossed with "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers." On the first night of their vacation, the Wilsons are greeted by the unnerving sight of four visitors, who appear to be near-identical versions of themselves, standing silently in their driveway. Gabe tries to communicate with them but to no avail.

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WINSTON DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) OK, let's call the cops.

LUPITA NYONG'O: (As Adelaide Wilson) I did. They're 14 minutes away.

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) What? Fourteen minutes? OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK. Jason, give me the bat.

EVAN ALEX: (As Jason Wilson) What bat?

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) The baseball bat, the bat. There's one in the...

SHAHADI WRIGHT JOSEPH: (As Zora Wilson) Here, here.

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) Thank you.

NYONG'O: (As Adelaide Wilson) Gabe...

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) All right. Hold on. I got this. Let's try this again.

NYONG'O: (As Adelaide Wilson) Gabe...

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right.

NYONG'O: (As Adelaide Wilson, yelling) Gabe.

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) Got this. I got this.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR CLOSING)

DUKE: (As Gabe Wilson) Now, I thought I already done told y'all to get off my property, OK? So if y'all want to get crazy, we can get crazy.

CHANG: The goofy dad humor in Winston Duke's delivery is a perfect example of Peele's tonal approach - his skill at balancing a horror and hilarity. He reminds us that laughing, screaming and thinking are not mutually exclusive pleasures. And he gives us plenty to think about once the doppelgangers force their way into the Wilsons' home and sit down with them around the fireplace, setting a long night of confrontation and terror in motion.

As Adelaide's evil twin explains with chilling deliberation, each doppelganger is a shadow of sorts, a neglected, forgotten soul that has had no real life of its own until now. Each of them wields a set of very large, very sharp scissors, the purpose of which is not just to torture and kill but also to sever the ties that bind the doubles to their masters.

Peele has noted that "Us" was inspired by a classic episode of the original "Twilight Zone" series called "Mirror Image" about a woman who meets her own double at a bus station. The movie takes that premise to a frightening new extreme by asking the question, what if the evil that dwells within took human form? What if we encountered our own worst enemy, and that enemy turned out to be us? But Peele doesn't belabor his conceit.

Even more than "Get Out," which built slowly to its gory climax, this is a full-throttle horror movie packed with pulse-pounding chase scenes, beautifully timed jolts and occasional geysers of blood. Peele's suspense technique has grown in confidence. The action is elegantly composed and sharply edited. And he shrewdly keeps the worst terrors just off screen, letting our imaginations do the rest.

He's also a marvelous director of actors. Elisabeth Moss gives a wickedly funny performance as a friend of the Wilsons who has made the mistake of vacationing with her own family nearby. Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are terrific as the Wilson children and also as their menacing doubles.

But "Us" belongs to Lupita Nyong'o, who won an Oscar for her wrenching work in "12 Years A Slave" and who carries this movie with a performance of astounding emotional force. It isn't just that Nyong'o is playing two roles - impressive as that is - she infuses Adelaide with so many distinct layers - from a survivor's lingering trauma to a mother's unshakeable resolve. There isn't a moment when she doesn't have us in her grip.

BIANCULLI: Justin Chang is a film critic for The LA Times. He reviewed "Us," the new horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. On Monday's show, how extremists use social media to amplify their message, recruit new followers and incite violence. We talk with J.M. Berger, who has studied and written about ISIS and white nationalist movements in the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the book "Extremism." Hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF SASHA MASHIN'S "SOME THOMAS")

BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Herzfeld. Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.

(SOUNDBITE OF SASHA MASHIN'S "SOME THOMAS")

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