I Don't Like Monday: Black Monday Review

One of the more unsatisfying works on TV this decade was Showtime’s House of Lies. It had one of the most talented collections of actors at the center – Don Cheadle, Kirsten Bell, Glynn Turman – and a lot of great guest actors. But like so many Showtime series, it drowned in its own muck. A huge part of the reason for this failure has to be laid at the feet of Cheadle. Playing Marty Conn, a management consultation whose sole purpose in life seemed to be created crises in companies that he was fired to fix, there was a self-destructive center in him that the series never explained. Part of was, he could never see beyond the next job even when he was ostensibly planning for his retirement. The statement: “It is not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose” gets at the center of his character. The problem was, everybody – even the people who hired him – were the enemy.

I wish I could say that Cheadle learned his lesion when he returned to Showtime a little more than three years later for their new series Black Monday. But unfortunately, about the only thing that separates Marty from Mo, the head of a hedge fund in the mid 1980s, is thirty years and a shitload of cocaine. And, given what I’ve seen in the last three episodes, Mo is even worse than Marty. Marty, however, disorganized he was, had a plan. Mo literally seems to fly by the seat of his pants, getting into worse and worse situations. And, as the series makes clear in it’s title, there are going to be horrible consequences. The series opens on October 19, 1987, the day of the worst stock market crash in American history, and its very clear that Mo’s going to cause it, and at least somebody we met is going to die as a direct result.

In House of Lies, Cheadle was practically the only strength of the series. Here, he’s the greatest anchor to it.  Marty, at least, was willing to do the work, and had people he cared about in his life. Mo’s closest companion seems to be his robot butler, and doesn’t seem willing to deal with any plan above the first step. He plays video games at morning meetings, and doesn’t seem willing to make any level of connection that isn’t an insult. The only thing you can say in his favor is that this is probably what every trader in Wall Street was at the time and may be now. But considering where we are as a culture, that just make the so-called comedy even more depressing.

It’s rather a shame because there actually are some good things in this series. Andrew Rannels does fine work as Blair, the corn-fed yokel who ends up working in Mo’s hedge fund as a direct pawn in Mo’s schemes. Blair is the only character on the series with any principles at all, which makes it almost certain he will get ground down. And by far the best thing about this show is that it finally gives a great role to Regina Hall, one of the great African-American character actresses of our time. Playing Dawn, Mo’s best trader as well as ex-girlfriend, Hall is exquisite playing a woman who is just as tough as man, and by far the smartest person in the room, she’s the only one who can call Mo on his bullshit and (sometimes) get away with it. What makes it more interesting that she has risen to her level even further than Mo has, considering that her parents were very close to hippies. She sees the world a lot clearer than anyone else, including her family and fiancé, and watching her in any scene, she clearly commands it.

I’m not going to deny it, there also a lot of very good 1980s references that this series that this shows take a lot of joy in bringing up. Mo is glad to have Rae Dawn Chong attend his birthday celebration. Dwight Gooden is invited to a characters bar mitzvah, but spends in 45 minutes in the bathroom. (three guesses why.) There’s a strong insinuation that Wall Street and Working are inspired by Mo’s firm, and it does this old gamers heart proud to see everybody at the firm looking at ‘Duck Hunt’ on a good old Nintendo like it’s the greatest ever thing. But I have to tell you, considering that this show came from the minds of Happy Endings, one of the most beloved series in recent years, and all the talent in front of the screen, Black Monday is a huge disappointment. Showtime may have run a big campaign for it (they even flashed back their logo to what it looked like in the 1980s), but there are better places to go for nostalgia. This is part of the 1980s I could really do without remembering.

My score: 2.25 stars.