Josh Lawson wears an unidentified watch

Josh Lawson plays Doug Guggenheim standing in a storeroom with his arms folded, in a short-sleeved dress shirt and a navy polka-dot tie, a gold watch catching the light on his left wrist. Doug is the youngest and most anxious member of the management-consulting pod at the center of House of Lies, the Showtime comedy that premiered on January 8, 2012, and ran five seasons. He is the pod's numbers man, a Harvard Business School graduate who works the credential into nearly every conversation, always a step behind Marty Kaan, the partner played by Don Cheadle who stops the scene cold to explain the con to the camera while the rest of the room freezes around him.

The watch is a dress piece, a round case in warm gold-colored metal on a brown leather strap. A domed crystal throws back the room's light and washes most of the pale dial to a blank, and no brand ever surfaces in the frame. It is a formal, grown-up watch on the pod's most junior man, the one who leans on the Harvard degree because he does not yet have the standing to lean on anything else.

House of Lies comes from a 2005 memoir by Martin Kihn, a former management consultant who titled his account of the trade House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time. That is the business in one sentence, the client billed for what he already owned. Doug is the pod member who least looks the part of a thief, the earnest one who believes the spreadsheets, and the show takes its time pulling him apart: by the fourth season his wife, played by Jenny Slate, has emptied his bank accounts and gone.