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.
The half-hour series, which begins Sunday, is clearly meant to satirize something, but the target is elusive. Caspe (who created “Black Monday” with Jordan Cahan) is best known for “Happy Endings,” a short-lived early 2010s network sitcom with a small but rabid fan base. “Happy Endings” charted the intertwined lives of a group of six besties, but it was really about an idea of communal post-college friendship in the post-"Friends” era.
In a similar way — but with a premium-cable license for smuttier and colder jokes — “Black Monday” seems to be satirizing an idea of 1980s Wall Street excess, rather than anything that actually existed. A subplot in the early episodes (three of 10 were available) even involves a writer trailing the show’s main character, trader Maurice “Mo” Monroe (Cheadle), to gather material for an Oliver Stone film. (“Wall Street,” one of the best-timed movies ever, came out two months after the real Black Monday.)
After retro-font versions of the Showtime logo and the show’s title, “Black Monday” opens with a short scene on the day of the crash: paper-strewn Lower Manhattan streets, a man with his head in his hands, a body plummeting from a height into a Lamborghini limousine. (If it’s not meant to suggest 9/11, it’s quite a coincidence; if it is, it fits with an overall harsh glibness reflected in a later joke about Michael Hutchence and autoerotic asphyxiation, or references to “Jew lawyers” and “Jew church” and a line like “You just holo-cost me my job.”)
Then the action jumps back a year, to October 1986, and we’re told that we’re going to learn why Black Monday happened. This will somehow involve Mo, founder of an upstart, outsider firm called the Jammer Group; his top trader and ex-lover, Dawn Towner (Hall); and Blair Pfaff (Rannells), a Bambi-like innocent who’s developed a revolutionary robo-trading algorithm.
The main thread of the story, so far, involves Mo’s elaborately planned entrapment of Blair, who ends up working at the Jammer Group when his loftier prospects fall through. Surrounding this are Mo’s risky play involving a jeans company and Lehman Bros. (portrayed as actual twin brothers, played by Ken Marino); the browbeating Blair takes at home from his spoiled wife (played by Casey Wilson, Caspe’s wife and a “Happy Endings” alum); and Dawn’s domestic life with her husband (Kadeem Hardison), a condescending surgeon.
The three leads do the best they can with their stock characters. Cheadle can do comically menacing braggadocio as well as anyone, and he’s perfectly convincing here, but the writing doesn’t give us much reason to care about Mo — his drives to make money and consume cocaine are surface attributes, like Cheadle’s obviously artificial Afro. (His business decisions, and the show’s depiction of the financial world in general, are distractingly illogical, even for a satirical comedy.)
Blair is just as one-note, befuddlement mixed with exasperation, though Rannells has slightly funnier material. Hall gets a little more to play; she’ll draw the audience’s sympathy, because she’s playing the only character you’re likely to make a connection to — but being Mo’s and the show’s guilty conscience is no bargain.
Most of these considerations will be beside the point if you’re a fan of the verbal warp and woof of Caspe’s method — the enveloping fabric of one-liners, insults, puns and, especially, references that register as jokes simply by virtue of their surprise value.
In “Black Monday” that humor often has a brotastic, locker room flavor, perhaps meant to invoke an innocently dirty quality in the film comedies of the period. In a scene where Blair is desperately trying to make a deadline, a Jammer trader takes out his penis and slaps Blair on the shoulder with it to distract him — while El DeBarge sings “When it feels like / the world is on your shoulders” on the soundtrack. The crash may be coming, but there’s a bull market in obviousness.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.