If I didn’t watch Peloton’s year-long fall from grace happen with my own eyes, I may not have believed it. But after Showtime’s hit drama Billions returned for its sixth season by associating the brand with another bad man, it’s official: Peloton is the villain of the fitness world.
On last night’s episode of Billions, Mike “Wags” Wagner (David Costabile), a man who has put his body through unspeakable hardships in the name of money, suffers a heart attack while exercising on his Peloton bike. EMTs barge into his door to find him simply overexerting himself on the bike, and then take him to an ambulance. The Peloton class causing a heart attack is vile enough, but the real villain was Wags’s new boss Michael Prince (Corey Stoll), who called the ambulance after surreptitiously monitoring Wags’s heart rate thanks to an activity tracker ring Prince gave to all the stock trading employees without telling them he would have real-time monitoring access to all their data. In two minutes of TV, Peloton was attached to a near-death experience and corporate invasion of privacy — another body shot to an already-rough spat of publicity.
