Black Monday

Broadly satirical. ... Thankfully, you don't have to like these jerks to enjoy them. [21 Jan - 3 Feb 2019, p.13]

Too much of Black Monday is sounds and furious self-absorption/deception.

Black Monday isn’t very successful at capturing the zeitgeist of the time beyond sappy music by Bryan Adams, cringe-worthy fashion choices and bright red Lamborghinis. The performers work well together, but they don’t have a lot to work with.

Cheadle, Hall and the supporting players lustily sink their teeth into these morally bankrupt characters, but "Black Monday" doesn't even make them particularly interesting as antiheroes. Nor does the big-buck finagling rival smarter versions of this material, leaving the '80s excesses as the program's main calling card.

There’s so much going on that it’s difficult to separate Black Monday’s sharpest moments from its constant throwaway lines. Cleverness appears in each of the first three episodes (one bit in which Oliver Stone’s hired researcher shadows Mo to get ideas for the movie “Wall Street” is a nice, full basket of ’80s Easter eggs), only to be drowned out by all the frantic energy and half-attempts at humor that smother it. Rannells and Cheadle are good together--enough so that the series may yet settle down and find its way.

Black Monday mines humor from its Wall Street cesspool and Maurice’s extravagance, but those two components eventually undermine whatever goodwill the character might inspire.

It’s possible to nail all the details but miss the feeling entirely. ... There’s hope yet for "Black Monday," whose first three episodes are carried across with confidence if nothing else; even when characters are delivering long and clumsily written chunks of exposition, they carry it off like tightly crafted David Mamet dialogue.

The problem is that the market is short for either catharsis or humor on Black Monday and, given the options abounding on TV, audiences may not want to bet on a whole season.

There is a lot about Black Monday that’s desperate; characters are desperate for success, respect, money, revenge, happiness, and change. It makes the show an uneasy watch, as its leads strain so hard to get what they think they need.

The Jammer Group would be nothing without the skill of Dawn Darcy, who is Maurice’s top lieutenant and former girlfriend. The same might be said of the show’s reliance on the actor in the role, Regina Hall. ... Dawn functions as the conscience of the show: she groans at the Challenger line before the audience can, and she articulates our objections to the nonsensicality of the plot. Still, she’s just a den mother. Cleaning up this crassness is janitorial work--it’s beneath her to manage such toxic assets.

The barrage of period allusions functions as a connective tissue binding the disjointed parts of Black Monday, which tries to stitch together an over-the-top comedy of the go-go ’80s and a tut-tutting, cautionary morality tale, fitted out with appropriate music, fashions and hairstyles. What it doesn’t supply is an actual feel for the period, or a coherent point of view about it, or anything more than clichés for the show’s talented stars--Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall--to play.