When Michael Madsen died back in July, most of the obituaries and social-media appreciation focused on the actor’s many collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, in which he played terrifyingly intense criminals with whispery voices. Mentioned far less often? Tilt, a rare star vehicle for Madsen. Tilt was a TV drama that ran for nine episodes in early 2005 on ESPN, back when that network—like nearly every other cable outlet at the time—was experimenting with original scripted programming.
Madsen is terrific in Tilt. He plays Don “The Matador” Everest, a Las Vegas legend, who has written books about poker strategy and has bankrupted hundreds—maybe thousands—of wannabe whales across his decades at high-stakes tables. By the time we meet him in Tilt, the Matador has developed a reputation as a genuinely dangerous man: vindictive, mob-connected, and working with a crew that helps him cheat.
This was a role made for Madsen. With his growly cadence and wounded eyes, he was built to play characters just past their prime, clinging fast to past glories. So why isn’t Tilt better-remembered? Maybe because it isn’t very good. Okay, that’s too harsh. Tilt isn’t terrible. It’s just…off. The cast is solid, the creative team is strong, and the milieu—the world of professional poker, captured at the height of the Texas Hold ‘Em boom—is fascinating. But the show feels caught between eras, still trying to be like the sensationalistic and shallow 1990s version of adult-oriented cable TV, at a time when other talented producers, writers, directors, and casts were making dramas and comedies as mature in artistic approach as they were in TV-MA content.
Tilt’s co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien would join those ranks of top-shelf TV auteurs a decade later with their Showtime series Billions, which does a lot of what Tilt tried to do—only much, much better. When they made this series, they were just a few years removed from writing the movie Rounders, a modest hit for director John Dahl (who also worked on Tilt) that had become a favorite among the emerging generation of poker players. In 2003, someone from that Rounders-loving generation—Chris Moneymaker, an online poker stud with a killer surname—won a much-watched World Series Of Poker main event on ESPN, super-charging the game’s popularity and spawning hundreds of hours of poker programming on cable.
Tilt combines the grubby, small-time, underworld milieu of Rounders with the newfound glitz of the WSOP. The season’s firsthalf is about an attempted sting, as three young gamblers—Eddie Towne (Eddie Cibrian), Clark Marcellin (Todd Williams), and “Miami” (Kristin Lehman)—each nursing a deep personal grudge against Don Everest, warily join forces with grizzled Vegas oddsmaker Seymour Annisman (Kenneth Welsh) to try and set up their own rigged game with the Matador. In a genuinely surprising mid-season twist, the team’s plan goes horribly awry. Someone at the Matador’s home casino, the Colorado—possibly its big boss, Jimmy Molloy (Michael Murphy)—has Seymour killed. When Eddie’s crew tries to take their revenge at the poker table, they discover the Matador is wise to their plan. He threatens to expose their own cheating to the cops unless they hand over their entire bankroll.
In the season’s second half, the trio regroups with the help of two unlikely allies. An Iowa cop named Lee Nickel (Chris Bauer), whose brother was killed for going after the Matador, has been trying to assemble evidence of Everest’s corruption, which these kids have witnessed firsthand. Meanwhile, the Colorado’s former business manager, Bart “Lowball” Rogers (Don McManus), gives the angry players the money to buy into a fictionalized version of the WSOP (called the World Championship Of Poker) to allow them a second chance at getting even with the Matador via their poker skills.
Tilt wasn’t ESPN’s first scripted series. In the fall of 2003, the network debuted Playmakers, an issue-driven melodrama about professional football, which reportedly drew the ire of the NFL for its sensationalism. But with Tilt (despite renaming the WSOP the WCOP), ESPN was able to depict big-time poker more or less as it was circa 2005 in part because ESPN had helped codify poker’s TV presentation.
Tilt’s hyper-dramatized version of pro poker features cameos from multiple real-life players, including “bad boy” Phil Hellmuth, who pushes around the Matador in one hand and then later suffers a bad beat, angrily muttering “frickin’ crime lord” as he moves away from the WCOP featured table. The WCOP scenes are shot to look just like the WSOP, with the same onscreen graphics and wry commentary from announcers Lon McEachern and Norman Chad. If nothing else, Tilt is a fairly accurate document of what the ESPN-driven poker mania looked and sounded like.
The ESPN connection doesn’t always help the show, though. Cameo appearances by network personalities Mike Greenberg (as a bartender) and Mike Golic (as a gambler) come off as corny. And the show looks cheap, as though it was operating on a basic-cable budget. Most of it was shot on nondescript Toronto hotel sets, with some obvious green screen to make it look like Las Vegas was right outside the window. (Unfortunately, because this show aired in 2005, before the era when nearly every new prestige TV drama received extensive coverage and reviews, there’s not a lot to be found on the internet about the making of Tilt. Oddly enough, the one major article about the show still floating around online is a New York Timespiece by the late, great David Carr, who wrote about it as an extension of ESPN’s poker empire.)
Still, just as they had done with Rounders, Koppelman and Levien brought to Tilt a more sophisticated understanding of what being “good at poker” means, in sharp contrast to all the decades of movies and TV shows where the best players somehow always got dealt the best cards. In Rounders and Tilt, championship-level players grind through fold after fold, waiting for the odds to shift subtly in their favor, at which point they use a combination of math and cockiness to apply pressure on their opponents. Even the Matador’s cheating racket is depicted realistically, showing how it involves a small group of confederates who stealthily signal what’s in their hands, giving Everest an edge on knowing what cards are left in the deck. His scam takes time, patience, and smarts.
Koppelman and Levien did not yet have as firm a grasp on how to make a TV show—although it’s hard to say how much of this is their fault and how much can be chalked up to some combination of network interference and the era’s trends. The year before Tilt debuted, the Emmy nominees for Outstanding Drama Series were The Sopranos, 24, CSI, Joan Of Arcadia, and The West Wing. Just one year later, the nominees were Lost, 24, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and The West Wing. A rapid shift was already underway in prestige television, away from the heavily episodic and toward the heavily serialized. Tilt did have a larger story, parceled out somewhat sloppily across its nine episodes. But it was also clogged up with smaller arcs that sometimes only lasted an episode or two, stalling the narrative momentum while rarely leaving much of an impression.
So while it’s awesome that the Tilt team was able to hire the incredible Robert Forster to play Eddie’s degenerate-gambler father for two episodes, the character ends up being more of a presence than a plot-driver. Similarly, Koppelman and Levien introduce a clever twist with Clark, who gives the impression of being a streetwise player from “the hood” but is secretly the son of a college dean. But there’s not enough screen-time available to tell that story properly. And as for Miami…oh, dear.
Look, most TV series from 20 years ago did a terrible job of giving female characters and people of color enough to do. In Tilt, Clark is the only prominent Black character, and for whatever reason, his storyline often feels like an afterthought. And while Lehman is an incredibly gifted actor, she’s annoyingly underused in Tilt, given a slim bit of backstory and almost nothing in the way of subplots. The lack of meaningful Miami business is made worse by nearly every other female character on this show being a stripper or a prostitute.
How about LGBTQ+ representation, you may ask? Alas, the only gay character of note is treated as a punchline. A stern gaming commission auditor (Duane Murray), whom the Colorado bosses try to influence with bribes and women, finally has his head turned by a seductive bellboy, played by a young Stephen Amell. That payoff to his storyline is as cynical as it is insulting.
Contrast all of the above with Billions, which thrived due to its diverse casting and its embrace of characters with sexual kinks and transgressive gender identities. Of course, by the time Billions rolled around, Koppelman and Levien had also gotten more of a handle on how to keep a potboiler plot boiling and audiencesengaged from episode to episode with twists, confrontations, and cliffhangers.
There are elements of what made Billions great evident in Tilt. Characters sometimes speak in a knowing pop-culture shorthand by comparing themselves to particular Top Gun pilots or casually referring to the third Rocky movie as just “three.” The Clark subplot includes a brief foray into money-management (his field of study in college before he dropped out to become a gambler), and Koppelman and Levien already seem jazzed up by the swashbuckling swagger of traders. They also show off their love of specialized lingo and snappy repartee, reveling in poker-table exchanges like, “That six minted me,” answered with, “You’re minted—I’m bonded,” or, “Should I call?” followed by, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.”
The dialogue has its share of clunkers too, mostly related to explaining certain concepts to the viewers. Too often, Tilt has scenes where gamblers talk about “the house edge” and the like to other gamblers who already know this information. And the persistent tough-guy talk of Eddie, Clark, and Miami makes them all feel one-dimensional—and obnoxious.
Where Tilt always shone though was in its portrayal of the Matador, a man so good at being bad that, at one point, Eddie wonders aloud if the old con’s poker schemes are really cheating, given how much effort goes into them. At another point, Lowball tries to warn Molloy that the Colorado’s big poker star is driving away business by fleecing every tourist who sits down at his table. Madsen plays all these notes wonderfully, crafting a villain stubbornly and proudly set in his ways.
A better version of Tilt would’ve leaned into this theme of an aging crook standing in the way of a changing Vegas. If only this show had been made a few years later, when cable’s “sympathetic antihero” phase was at its peak, its focus might’ve been stronger and clearer. Ultimately, Tilt’s central conflict should never have been between the young gamblers and the Matador, but rather between the Matador and modernity.
One-season wonder, weirdo, or wannabe? A wannabe with moments of wonder.
