Bull: Stock Characters

By James Poniewozik

Hands up, folks: Who likes money? We thought so! O.K., hands up: Who likes people who wear watches that cost more than your car?

Hello? Anyone?

There you have the challenge facing Michael Chernuchin, the creator of TNT's new series Bull (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), as he speculates on the appeal of Wall Street drama. (Fox will do likewise in November with Darren Star's randy The $treet.) True, medical and legal shows have upper-class heroes, but we focus more on Ally's sex life than her 401(k) balance. Whereas a mergers and acquisitions specialist on Bull talks about having a kid in a $17,000-a-year private school (he bets that much on Mets games too). We're meant to empathize. But in populist TV, the rich have tended to be more loaded than lovable.

Chernuchin hopes past performance is no guarantee of future results, now that workaday Americans buy stocks and CNBC plays in hair salons. In the go-go '80s, he had friends on the Street who once flew him on a leased jet to Pebble Beach in California because they felt like playing golf. "[They] had more in their pockets than I made in a year," he says. But what stuck with him was the drama in their work. "It was the power and the game. They weren't just interested in closing a deal. They wanted to crush the other guy. It was amazing to watch."

The big networks doubted viewers would agree. But for a cable channel launching its first-ever series, Bull's risk seems worth the potential return. "We wanted to do something that would distinguish ourselves," says TNT programming president Robert DeBitetto. And Chernuchin was able to snag big-screen actors Stanley Tucci and Donald Moffat; Ryan O'Neal has signed for a guest spot.

To get the audience rooting for his characters--Young Turks leaving a major financial firm to strike out on their own--Chernuchin, a former Law & Order writer and executive producer, stacks the show's morality in their favor like a Carnegie Deli sandwich. Their former boss (Moffat) is a Harvard-accented, corrupt and racist toff who would twirl his mustache if he had one. "Only a child," he purrs, "would think that the world doesn't work with a wink and a nod and a handshake between old pals smoking Cohibas." His grandson and the renegades' leader, Ditto (George Newbern), is Bull's Luke Skywalker, out to escape Grandpa's musty clutches. In the year's most cornball TV speech outside a convention, he urges his Rolex rebels to "try investing in yourself for once! [Become] the hero of your own life!" What is this, David Copper Futures?

Well, you have to expect a little melodrama--though Bull provides more than a little, saddling its well-heeled heroes mawkishly with personal burdens to up their sympathy quotient. More unsettling is the subtext of Ditto's crusade. Bull has internalized the trendy, bogus messages of Ameritrade ads, "new-economy" magazines like Fast Company and career gurus like Tom Peters: that entrepreneurship is heroism, that job insecurity is emancipation, that work is art and love and rock 'n' roll. Ditto mocks "the suits...who want to stay [at the firm] for the rest of their lives nice and safe in their little cubicles, papered with guarantees and weekly paychecks. But I thought we were different. I thought we were better than that." Better, that is, than most of the audience, poor chumps, with their boring old-economy longings for job security, insurance and a salary.

Let's hope Bull, which is stylishly shot and admirably Street savvy, complicates its world view. Brokers are neither new-economy Guevaras nor inherently evil Gekkos. They're interesting people in a fascinating field that deserves further exploration. But Bull's idealism comes off as, well, bull. "It's not about money," one character says of his career choice. "It's about being at the heart of the world." Uh-huh. As H.L. Mencken said, whenever anyone tells you it's not about money...it's about money.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles