Bad for Business = Good for Entertainment

The plot of an engaging play on Broadway, Enron, is ripped straight from The Wall Street Journal. In the opening scene, high-living finance types celebrate an accounting technique that promises to vault their business into the stratosphere. There are off-balance sheets, conflicts of interest, credulous Wall Street analysts, a hands-off CEO, and a dorky and greasy-haired finance jockey who becomes a buff stud before crashing. When they're not screwing one another, the venal, vain executives are screwing over the shareholder.

The protagonist (played with flair and great energy by Tony Award winner Norbert Leo Butz) isn't Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld or Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. It's Jeffrey Skilling, the now-jailed CEO of Enron. The show  sends up what was, until the fall of 2008, one of the greatest debacles in American financial history. With the talk of George W. Bush's candidacy, deregulated electricity markets, and trading bandwidth capacity, the content is definitely last decade. But the human foibles it lays bare—the grasping, the arrogance and hubris of financiers, the temptations of off-balance-sheet debt, the corruption of the business establishment, and the refusal to take responsibility—are very much au courant.

Here are a few of the best attempts to capitalize on capitalism as entertainment.