Black Monday, in the historical sense, refers to 19 October 1987, the single worst day for America’s stock market in its history. It’s a potentially risky premise around which to build a TV show, given that the event, which didn’t induce a crippling economic depression, doesn’t loom particularly large in either pop cultural memory or the actual memory of anyone under 30. But the Dow Jones still dropped 22.6 points on Black Monday, which is about the level of subtlety on this new series of the same name.
The Seth Rogen-produced show, which attempts to tell the unknown story behind who and what caused the crash, begins on the titular day with a hollowed-out Wall Street and a body dropping on to a car. It then jumps backwards, to 1986, and to the presumed triggers of Black Monday: brash Maurice “Mo” Monroe (Don Cheadle) leader of his outsiders band of traders, the Jammer Group; his deputy trader and ex-lover, Dawn Towner (Regina Hall); and aw-shucks Blair Pfaff (Andrew Rannells) a fresh Wharton grad with an algorithm and a serious girlfriend, both potentially lucrative. Monroe, recently deemed the 11th best trader by the Wall Street Journal, is bent on finding a higher high, be it a Lehman Brothers-owned property or another mound of cocaine. The first couple of episodes, though they include some truly surprising plot twists, serve mostly to establish the frenetic volatility of the characters and the 1980s Wall Street they inhabit. By 1980s, I mean the version of the 1980s that pop culture has established as THE EIGHTIES, a Technicolor and synth-blazed affair of Run DMC, Marion Barry references, big hair and bigger egos.
Inflated sense of power, high stakes, big hip thrusts, bold instances of sexual harassment – Black Monday packs it all in, to the unfortunate effect of flattening its characters. As a cable series, Black Monday has the toys of prestige TV at its disposal – a recognizable and critically lauded cast, flexibility on episode length, money for music rights, freedom from the censor. But though the hair is high, the shoulders puffed, the acids washed, somehow all the closeups of Walkmans and literal mixtapes amount to how these traders treat their job: play.
To be fair, the show does seem to be a parody; Mo doesn’t get his knee up to his chest, foot resting on a desk, for nothing. But effective parody pulls exaggeration into more honest humor and for the most part, Black Monday just isn’t that funny. The show often has the feel of sketch comedy – exaggerated physical gestures, note players like Cocaine Delivery Man, dialogue that builds extemporaneously on mundane physical surroundings like chairs – but without its freewheeling excitement. It’s unclear, after three episodes available for critics, what larger truth about Wall Street or the 80s Black Monday tries to tell, other than that there was a lot of cocaine (and characters asking “do you want to do some cocaine?” to signal that you are in the 1980s and people do cocaine). Not that a show needs to have a take-home “message”, but Black Monday posits itself as the untold account of a significant historical event, one in which an African American trader takes on an establishment which has no interest in making room for him or his success. Black Monday is not merely a 1980s story.
Black Monday does have its pleasures, however. The shoulder pads and Michael Jackson sightings are entertaining; like a good 80s-themed party, it’s fun to play dress-up in extra-period tracksuits and chunky jewelry. Mo is a thinly written shock jock but in Cheadle’s hands, can still carry the room. Andrew Rannells is Andrew Rannells as a nerdy 80s computer nerd who you half-expect to burst into song at any moment, which is in itself entertaining. Black Monday’s brightest star, however, is Regina Hall as Dawn, whose fight to earn long-overdue recognition from Mo is the most genuine emotional current on the show.
Like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street before it, Black Monday aims to mine the wonkish, exclusive world of Wall Street finance into a narrative that a larger, presumably un-coked audience can follow. 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.
Black Monday starts on Showtime on 20 January with a UK date yet to be announced