Black Monday

It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, and the cast has instant comedic chemistry. It also mines a lot of laughs by reveling in gaudy ’80s nostalgia: floppy disks and shoulder pads, the aforementioned stretch Lamborghini (aka a “Lambo limo”) and a robot butler who dutifully fetches cocaine. But there are hints of melancholy around the edges, too, and a plot twist at the end of the pilot that actually adds a level of intrigue to what follows.

Ups and downs aside, Black Monday's meta, madcap silliness works as a parody of the genre and a fresh take on an old story. It's a good investment.

The comedy, starring an effervescent Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall, is an outrageous reimagining of what caused the Wall Street crash of 1987 and is packed to its coke-crusted gills with rapid-fire one-liners, not all of which work, but it doesn't matter because the one that comes three seconds later probably will.

This is the first time anybody has unleashed director Seth Rogen, the overlord of Hollywood juvenilia, on the subject, and Black Monday is every bit as madly, sickly funny as you might expect.

At the same time, Black Monday can be very funny, very clever about incorporating 1980s cultural references (not counting the piles of coke and “Wolf of Wall Street”-style excess) and very vulgar. It’s also propelled by three extremely talented people, among them Mr. Cheadle, who makes Mo abrasive, egotistic and obnoxious, yet at the same time a sympathetic outsider.

There are enough storylines planted in the opening episodes to promise plenty of opportunities for these characterization issues to even out as the season goes on. And this and the occasional burst of misplaced schmaltz only stand out as issues because Cheadle and Hall so confidently grasp their characters from their first seconds on screen; they’re instant icons. More layered jokes emerge as the group dynamic solidifies.

Black Monday is peppered with stock characters, but thanks to the sharp writing and the skills of the cast, virtually every one of them is intriguingly offbeat and, not incidentally, flat-out funny.

Cheadle and Hall approach the roles with a lack of piousness, infesting their characters with humorous bits of business that almost always land. ... One feels Hall’s anger, but like Richard Pryor, she mines a bleak and tense situation for all its comic potential--and the results are perpetually perceptive.

Even the only adult in the room, Mo’s deeply undervalued deputy and ex-girlfriend Dawn Darcy (Regina Hall, whose characteristically warm performance gives viewers an unexpected hero), has to indulge their sophomoric antics to survive. What makes Jammer tolerable is the threat it poses to an industry Caspe and Cahan portray as being numb to human suffering, where bratty blue bloods like the hilarious twin “Lehman Brothers” (both played by comedy treasure Ken Marino) hold all the power.

Sure, Black Monday needs to slow down every once in a while or risk exhaustion; when Rogen and Goldberg are behind the camera for the premiere, they transfer the chaos of the trading floor to practically every other setting, pushing things right up to the edge of shrill. In its first three episodes, the show hasn’t figured out a proper balance.

The “everything and the kitchen sink” approach taken by Caspe and Cahan pays dividends up front: Their episodes race by with loads of joyful enthusiasm, even as they’re laced with doomed morose. ... But it’s also awash in red flags for a burgeoning series, as the lead character is a questionable, outdated pick and the premise begs for a quick resolution to the mystery being teased.