Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s Office Gets Hollywood Treatment in Showtime Series

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The Showtime series ‘Billions’ follows federal prosecutors’ pursuit of financial-industry misdeeds. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, gave them guidance not only on the mechanics of the office, but on the ethical underpinnings of his work. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Last year, Preet Bharara upended New York politics with a pair of public-corruption cases that held all of the suspense, scheming and profanity of a Hollywood drama.

This year, his office is getting a Hollywood treatment of its own.

Starting Jan. 17, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York will receive the small-screen spotlight in “Billions,” a Showtime series that follows federal prosecutors’ pursuit of financial-industry misdeeds.

While the Manhattan U.S. attorney character isn’t based exclusively on Mr. Bharara, the show charts the efforts of a crusading federal prosecutor to fell a hedge-fund billionaire whose contemporary-art-filled suburban office and fleece-wearing employees evoke one of Mr. Bharara’s highest-profile targets: Steven A. Cohen.

In bringing that type of dynamic to screen, the show’s writers, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, went to great lengths to capture the inner workings of the U.S. attorney’s office and the universe of hedge-fund titans. Their efforts won them the cooperation of many real-life counterparts, particularly Mr. Bharara and his cohorts.

“We felt an obligation to be as forensically accurate as we could be about how they do what they do, even if part of our job is to imagine the why,” Mr. Koppelman said in an interview with Mr. Levien at their Manhattan offices.

To start, Messrs. Levien and Koppelman met with Mr. Bharara—to whom they were introduced by “Billions” co-creator Andrew Ross Sorkin—over dinner at the West Village restaurant Babbo in April 2014.

The U.S. attorney gave them guidance not only on the mechanics of the office, but on the ethical underpinnings of his work. “We find Preet to be fascinating and deep, and he really allowed us to find the right reasons that people in that job do that job,” said Mr. Koppelman. “It’s clear that he’s somebody who believes tremendously in what he’s doing.”

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Actor Paul Giamatti plays the fictional U.S. attorney for the Southern District. Photo: JoJo Whilden/SHOWTIME

Separately, Mr. Bharara, who declined an interview request for this article, met with the actor Paul Giamatti, who was preparing to play the fictional U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Chuck Rhoades, a media-savvy prosecutor with a penchant for news conference poster-boards and a playful sense of humor.

Finally, during preproduction for the “Billions” pilot, the U.S. attorney’s office allowed Messrs. Koppelman and Levien to tour its headquarters in downtown Manhattan, where the pair sought to capture the unglamorous aesthetic of the workplace and chatted informally with assistant U.S. attorneys and support staff.

“You just got this incredible sense of purpose, and you thought to yourself, ‘I would hate to do anything to get in their cross hairs,’” said Mr. Koppelman, himself a graduate of Fordham Law School. “They don’t lose very often.”

The show also employed two paid consultants: Duncan Levin, a former prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, and Turney Duff, a former stock trader who once worked for Raj Rajaratnam, one of Mr. Bharara’s biggest convictions.

On the financial-industry end, Damian Lewis, who plays “Billions” hedge-fund head Bobby Axelrod, has said he consulted with many of the best-known names from that world, including hedge-fund magnates and activist investors Daniel Loeb and Bill Ackman.

In addition to the source material from Messrs. Levien and Koppelman’s interviews—which they said they conducted with numerous current and former prosecutors, investigators and Wall Street figures—they appeared to draw on a number of real Southern District cases, particularly the high-profile insider trading trial of Mathew Martoma, a former employee of Mr. Cohen’s firm who was convicted in 2014. Mr. Cohen has denied any wrongdoing and wasn’t charged criminally.

Though the writers demurred when asked about specific cases they mined, elements of the central narrative of “Billions” mirror the Martoma scenario, including federal agents’ failed efforts to convince Mr. Axelrod to rehire a former employee they had flipped into a wire-wearing informant.

Mr. Martoma’s case pivoted on inside information about a clinical trial he obtained from a doctor in Michigan. In “Billions,” the storyline pivots on an Iowa research scientist whom prosecutors learn was coaxed by a trader into divulging test results.

Still, “Billions” is built for premium cable, where the nonpublic results of a clinical trial hardly qualify as titillating TV.

“We tried to research enough in all of the areas to gain a facility with the realities, so that accuracy was within our grasp, but then we did always have to hew to what was dramatic,” Mr. Levien said.

To that end, the show also portrays interoffice dynamics of the legal and regulatory universes inhabited by the Southern District, showing an at-times acidic relationship with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and a competitive rapport with the Eastern District, which the writers said the prosecutors with whom they spoke likened to the rivalry between Harvard and Yale.

Also shown on screen is what Messrs. Koppelman and Levien attest are the sometimes steamy antics between prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents they work alongside, which the writers assert they drew directly from their conversations with both sides.

The FBI agents said “in that very dry way FBI people will talk to you, ‘Uh, yes, very often physical congress may occur between the United States attorneys and the FBI agents,’ ” Mr. Koppelman said, mimicking a halting speech pattern. “And the attorneys confirmed it.”

And for all of the character traits and case details drawn from Mr. Bharara’s office, there are numerous liberties taken for dramatic effect, most notably the fictional prosecutor’s private identity as a sexual submissive. For anyone eager to see the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, say, in his boxers while bound, gagged and zapped with an electric cattle prod, “Billions” may be your best bet.

Still, the show paints a largely recognizable portrait of the law-enforcement agency as well as of Wall Street, and the writers said they took pains to give each its due.

“Both sides of it—the hedge-fund guys and the U.S. attorney’s side—both believe they are the beset in a noble fight,” Mr. Levien said. “It’s not like either side is moustache-twirling and is cynical about it. They both believe that they’re righteous in their cause.”

Write to Erica Orden at erica.orden@wsj.com