(MONEY Magazine) – Does anyone still remember Gordon Gekko? Well, yes, of course people remember Gordon Gekko. As played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gekko was--and remains--the most memorable financier ever created by Hollywood.

So let me rephrase the question: Does anyone still remember what Gordon Gekko represented? An Oliver Stone creation--Stone both wrote and directed Wall Street--Gekko was Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn and Michael Milken rolled into one. Except much, much worse. Everything about Gekko, from his slicked-back hair to his stretch limo, was meant to suggest the sheer uncaring rapaciousness of Wall Street. Gekko is casually corrupt, and casually corrupting; he gets Charlie Sheen, who plays a young broker eager to learn from the master, to feed him inside information as his price of entry. Gekko sees his machinations as little more than a game, never considering the consequences of his maneuvers to real people who work at real companies. On the contrary, being an evil corporate raider, Gekko gets his kicks from taking over a company and then decimating it--laying off employees, raiding the pension fund, cutting back on critical R&D, and so on. In his most famous line--stolen from Boesky, by the way--Gekko stands up at the shareholder meeting of a company he's trying to acquire and snarls, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Stone's message could not be clearer: Whatever greed is, it is not good.

When I watched the movie recently, though, I was struck by another scene. Martin Sheen, Charlie Sheen's real-life father, plays his father in the movie; he's a salt-of-the-earth head mechanic at a troubled airline--exactly the kind of guy Gekko puts out of work. Over beers after work one day, he says to his son sadly, "You could have been a doctor or a lawyer"--instead of an investment banker. In Wall Street, in other words, Gekko is no mere bad apple. They're all little Gekkos on Wall Street. As Stone sees it, the only way an investment banker can redeem himself is by turning his back on his profession. Which, needless to say, is exactly what Charlie Sheen does. (Hey, it's the movies.)

Thirteen years after Wall Street, Hollywood decided to have another go at the subject. This time, the venue is television, where not one but two stock market-related dramas were launched last fall. One, The Street, has already been canceled by Fox. The brainchild of Darren Star, the man responsible for HBO's popular series Sex and the City, it was scheduled against The West Wing and never had a chance. Though Star toned things down for Fox, The Street was edgy, cynical and drenched in sex. The other show, Bull, airs on TNT and is the first series produced by Turner Broadcasting. (Turner and MONEY are both owned by Time Warner.) Bull takes a more conventional approach--it has more in common with an earnest drama like Providence than with anything so risque as Sex and the City.

Yet for all their obvious differences, what struck me most about these two shows was their similarities: frantic trading desks, gorgeous investment bankers, dotcom IPO plot lines--and a view of investment banking that could not be more different from Oliver Stone's. No longer does Hollywood portray Wall Streeters as the scum of the earth. Now they're just a bunch of boys and girls trying to get rich--and what's wrong with that? Sometimes they're even trying to do good. On these shows you'll never see a working-class father telling his Wall Street son that he could have been a doctor or a lawyer. In Hollywood terms, investment bankers have become the doctors and lawyers. That is to say, they've become the good guys.

Bull has its sympathies sewn to its sleeve. Its heroes are a small band of young bankers who break away from Merriweather Marx, the most powerful firm on Wall Street. Their leader, Robert Roberts III, nicknamed "Ditto," also happens to be the grandson of the old firm's patriarch, a.k.a. "The Kaiser." Ditto's troops include an African-American bond whiz, an up-from-the-streets-of-New-York Italian-American female investment banker and a wet-behind-the-ears trader from South Dakota. (Hey, it's television.)

And why are they breaking away from Merriweather Marx? Because they're idealists! Merriweather Marx is portrayed as a hidebound firm that will never allow a black man to become partner, and that takes advantage of inside information to help powerful friends in Washington. Ditto and his group want to be better than that.

The early plots revolve around their efforts to fight their old firm's attempts to crush them. But they also grapple with their own demons. In one episode, Carson Boyd, the wet-behind-the-ears South Dakotan, pretty much blackmails a high-ranking state official to land a $50 million bond issue. He feels terrible about it, but he takes comfort in knowing that his motives are pure. After all, his firm's bid will cost the taxpayers of South Dakota much less than the higher bid the corrupt official accepted. "I did the wrong thing for the right reason," Boyd says. And the fat fee his firm will earn by underwriting the bonds? They'll take it, but that's not the point.

Then there's that dotcom IPO plot. In this episode, Marissa Rufo, the up-from-the-streets-of-New-York investment banker, is trying to take public a search-engine company created by a kid from the old neighborhood. The kid and his family have put their trust and faith in Rufo--even turning down a $3 million buyout on her advice. And, well, you can pretty much write the rest of the story line yourself. Internet stocks crash, the IPO looks hopeless and the family feels betrayed by Rufo. But she charges forward anyway. When the stock opens, things are dicey for a few hours, but then buyers start to come in and the stock rockets upward--closing 50 points above the offering price. The family is ecstatic. The banker is redeemed. Money has been made by one and all. It's investment banking at its most heartwarming.

As it happens, the very first episode of The Street also revolved around a dotcom IPO. The firm at the center of the show, Balmont Stevens, has decided to back a ridiculous company called Ivygenes, which brokers sperm from Ivy League graduates. (Did I mention that the show is drenched in sex?) The two company founders are classic dotcom jerks, and Balmont Stevens has zero interest in Ivygenes except as a way of making money from a successful offering. Naturally, as the offering date nears, Net stocks crash, the dotcom jerks get mad at their bankers--and the bankers decide to bravely forge ahead. When the stock opens, things are dicey for a few hours, but then buyers start to come in and the stock rockets upward. In The Street, though, after the market closes, with the stock up--whaddaya know!--50 points from the offering price, the two dotcom jerks start bumping chests and bragging about how rich they are. "Meet the new ruling class," says one of the bankers.

That was the tone of The Street. Greed is nakedly on display. Corners get cut on the trading floor that may or may not be legal. The banter at Balmont Stevens is pretty raw by network television standards. The most compelling character on the show is a trader named Freddie Sacker, an egomaniacal, sexist troublemaker who's tolerated because he makes money for the firm.

All of which is to say that, sexual subplots aside, The Street came far closer than Bull to capturing the ethos of Wall Street, which can be a pretty crude, sexist, cynical place. And yet, and yet. Even on The Street, underneath all that cynicism, the bankers and traders have proverbial hearts of gold. Even Freddie Sacker. In one episode, after a trader has a heart attack on the floor, Sacker immediately starts scheming to get the man's commissions. By the end of the episode, he does in fact get them--but not because he schemed for them. No, he's Done the Right Thing--which, this being The Street, revolves around sex.

Ultimately, of course, neither show portrays Wall Street life as it really is. What they do portray is something more interesting: our own changing view of the Street. Hollywood, after all, invariably mirrors the culture at large. When Oliver Stone made Wall Street, Milken was under attack by the government, and the country really did blame corporate raiders for destroying companies and throwing people out of work.

And today? Today nobody's offended by corporate takeovers--not if they lead to a bump in the stock price. Wall Street analysts like Henry Blodget have become characters in our national drama, and the market has become as riveting as sports. Is it any wonder that Hollywood would change its view of Wall Street? It's not just Hollywood that doesn't view investment bankers as bad guys anymore. We don't either.

"Let's make some green!" they say on Bull after their morning meeting. To these tender ears, that sure sounds a lot like "Greed is good." But 13 years after Wall Street, it just doesn't get the same rise out of us.

Joseph Nocera, editor-at-large at Fortune and author of A Piece of the Action, can be reached at big-picture@moneymail.com.