BILLIONS does some of the best work on commercial-free TV of delivering 50+ minute episodes with very few lulls, and I'm kind of obsessed with figuring out how they do it. Partly I think it's that most of the take-a-break-to-focus-on-character scenes are all about digging into the obsessive drive of the characters involved, which makes those scenes feel like race-cars gunning their engines at the starting line, waiting for the cue to go.

I am now gonna bore the fuck out of you with a piece of writing advice from a William Goldman book that I use nearly every day. Goldman adapted his own novel MARATHON MAN into a film of the same name. He was on set during a confrontation between Laurence Olivier's villain and another character played by Roy Scheider. Goldman scripted an exchange between Olivier and Scheider as follows: