Hit Or Miss: Black Monday Strikes Again
The 1987 stock market crash got a campy makeover. Black Monday is a a half-hour comedy about the worst stock crush in the U.S. history (also know as Black Monday), depicting the loud, chaotic and brash unseen characters behind the walls painted with the aftermath of economic recession. The series’ first season unveiled a world based on modern history, possessed a disastrous charm like The Wolf of Wall Street, but without the self awareness—it’s a dark comedy. Executive produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the Showtime dark comedy halted stars like Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, Andrew Rannells and Paul Scheer, premiered its first season in 2019, and part of the second season in March and April 2020. The second part of season two, announced by Showtime, is returning in late June. The series is centered around Maurice Monroe (a.k.a Mo), farcically portrayed by Cheadle, a fictional character who owns a robot butler, a Lamborghini limousine, and wears the best and worst of the 80’s. Mo is a veteran stockbroker whom the series implies as part of the cause of the Black Monday.
In the teaser, Mo shares that his upcoming plans will not only his own life but also change history, to which his teammates remain doubtful. The short trailer is packed with a costume party, Mo holding a gun, a foot fetish joke, Blair Pfaff (Andrew Rannells) denouncing his gayness, identity theft, a car accidental, all lead to getting the FBI involved. Unlike the stock market, the stake is getting higher and the success of Mo’s plan needs full pledge from the team. Mo is ready to change history.
The allure of Mo goes beyond one raunchy punchline after another. Jumping off the script, Mo contains layers. In the first part of season two, Mo joined a band in Miami before getting sucked back into Wall Street and the game play. In 1980’s, Black men were not stock brokers. In order to tap into a nuanced portray of a character not existed, Cheadle described his process as “borrowing from the model of who these guys were, their psychological makeup, and modus operandi of winning without fear of loss” during an interview. Looking back in time, the 80’s was a pivotal point for cultural change in the United States. The series featured closeted gay men, hysterical classism and intricately explored race. “This show often shows how far we have and have not come,” said Cheadle, “We can take the perspective of now, the advances that have and have not been made.”
Amidst the recent national outcry for police reform, Don Cheadle came out to share his experiences being racially profiled and held at gun point interacting with the police. During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, he described how aggressively minorities were pursued by police and referenced Operation Hammer, a 1987 policy supposedly aimed at curbing gang violence in Los Angeles. In the same year Black Monday happened. Although the series is about something that happened decades ago, living in late 80’s as a Black man didn’t require too much of Cheadle’s imagination—he lived it. “I got stopped more times than I can count and guns put to my head…I always fit the description,” Cheadle recalled his early days in Hollywood, and reflected upon the outrage towards police brutality, “I have good friends who were almost killed by the police for nothing, so this is not something that was new to me once all of these videos started to come out. This was something that we knew very well was happening, they just weren’t being filmed.”
In Black Monday, Mo is the hero: a Black man who holds the fate of Wall Street by the neck. He overtakes a world owned by old white man with his overwhelmingly flamboyant dominance, which makes it difficult for the audience to root for the underdog. The series missed the bullseye with its tone problem. The obnoxious 80’s-ness that flew out of the writer’s room, though done with the heart for comedy, can’t help but sound pitchy spoken by these unlikely heroes. The audience who tuned in to find out what really happened to the 1987 stock market crash might be deterred by this never-ending banters between wealthy troublemakers. After all, the U.S. is swimming by the bay of recession. With record-breaking unemployment on our shoulder due to the pandemic, Black Monday’s “mockery” on the economy might hit too close to home. Luckily, Mo isn’t real, we can still laugh at his antics without worrying about the future ahead: Black Monday already happened. But still, are we reprising a disaster?
Season 2 of Black Monday will return June 28, 2020 on Showtime.