Pass/Fail: Black Monday Vows to ‘Never’ Have Female Nude Scenes

[playahaitian]

Black Monday Vows to ‘Never’ Have Female Nude Scenes
By Whitney Friedlander

Don Cheadle and Regina Hall. Photo: Michael Buckner/Variety/Shutterstock

Black Monday, Showtime’s new raunchy dark comedy about the lead-up to the infamous October 1987 stock market crash, is far from prudish. The Don Cheadle, and Regina Hall–led show blatantly and gleefully boasts gags about cocaine, prostitutes, and twin brothers who totally have sex with each other, but series creators Jordan Cahan and David Caspe don’t plan on going full Wolf of Wall Street.

“There will never be female nudity on this show,” Cahan said during the show’s Television Critics Association press day on Thursday in Pasadena. “Despite the fact that that was a huge piece of that world … we are a comedy and we don’t necessarily want to contribute to that.”

Male nudity, though? Cahan clarified that Black Monday is fine with that — plus, in the series premiere, they already put to use a penis prosthetic.

With that burning question out of the way, an even bigger one remains: How will this show continue past a single season? After all, the episode titles are numbered based on how many days the characters — a ragtag group of second-tier Wall Street traders — are away from the Black Monday crash. “There are things that came right after [the crash] in ’88 and ’89, like the Savings and Loan Crisis,” Cahan said. “So if we were going to play with that dynamic, there’s a lot of fun pieces that we can play with and we can satirize.”

But, as co-star Paul Scheer joked during the panel, they just have to make sure all those events happened on a Monday.

 

[fu2]

For a 30 minute show it moves fast enough that it isn't necessary. But since that fine ass Regina Hall ain't doing it, it's cool. That's what I really want. I mean, I'd expect some Wolf of Wall Street foolishness given the excess. I can easily hit the net or Instagram to see a stranger's titty.

 

[REDLINE]

Ummm ok

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Honestly, had been hoping like hell Hall had her nude scenes hovering on the horizon.

 

[D24OHA]

Honestly, had been hoping like hell Hall had her nude scenes hovering on the horizon.

Hahaha

 

[sammyjax]

Regina's ass looks great in them stonewashed joints

 

[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

‘Black Monday’ Bosses on Finding ‘Internal Line of What Felt Appropriate’ for Premium Cable Comedy
By DANIELLE TURCHIANO

Danielle Turchiano
Senior Features Editor, TV@danielletbdFOLLOW
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CREDIT: DAVID BUCHAN/VARIETY/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
“Black Monday” co-creators Jordan Cahan and David Caspe have a storied history of broadcast comedies (“Happy Endings” for Caspe, “Breaking In” for Cahan, and “Marry Me” for both of them). When they set out on the new endeavor of 1980s-set stock market crash comedy for premium cabler Showtime they knew they’d have a bit more freedom in style and structure but they didn’t want to completely alter their sensibility just because they could.

“Because the show was set in the ’80s there was all this language used that we find abhorrent now — and rightly so — but there were all these words bantered around…so we had to be very careful who we allowed to say those words,” Cahan said during the Showtime Television Critics Assn. panel for the comedy Thursday. “For example, our villains were allowed to say some of those words, as opposed to…our heroes — even though they had flaws.”






Cahan continued to point out that the tricky thing overall as figuring out how far they could go with certain things just because they were on premium cable. “It was finding our own internal line of what felt appropriate,” he explained. And for them, the answer was to never show female nudity.



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“We are a comedy; we don’t necessarily want to contribute to that on TV,” he explained.

Similarly, Cahan and Caspe took care behind the scenes to reflect the world today, which led to making sure “that every different type of person who’s not just on the show but [also exists] in the world was in the writers’ room,” said Caspe.

On the storytelling side of things, though, Caspe admits having less boundaries allows them to “do weird episodes or weird tangents…which I think is why people gravitate towards watching some of these cable shows or premium shows.”

“Three act structure breaks out to three or four commercial breaks is still a helpful structure and is not dissimilar to a movie structure [in] plot beats and turns and how the story works. What’s great about doing a cable show is you’re not as beholden to that,” Caspe said. “We could use that as the rule to break when we wanted to break it and use it as the rule when it was helpful.”

And the 1980s setting has been key, though. The show utilizes stock footage from the real-life time period to depict period accurate New York. And the level of technology that was accessible during that time has become integral, as well. While Caspe joked that “we probably overuse mobile phones,” given how expensive and unreliable they were at the time, they do have an episode “where they get lost.”

Both executive producers shared that a lot of research went into the show to get such accuracy, pulling from news and events of the real time period in which the show is set — such as the O’hare spread — as well as from co-creator David Caspe’s father’s stories. Caspe shared his father was a commodities trader in Chicago and “used to tell me a bunch of crazy stories.”

“It’s shocking how many horrible stories my father has that he has incredible details of that he claims no part in,” he said, citing examples such as “As I was walking out, I saw all these prostitutes walking in…”





But, Cahan noted, they also wanted to “have fun with the era,” so they consider the show a “punk rock mix, messing with genres.”

“The trickiest part of that is finding actors who are world class in both parts of that — in drama and comedy,” Cahan said. “We are immensely fortunate to have the people we have on the show. … As the season moves on you’ll see a lot more of that.”

“Black Monday” stars Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells, Regina Hall, Paul Scheer, Casey Wilson and Ken Marino who all have to skirt the line of serious situations with high-octane humor.

Cheadle in particular pointed out that he ’80s setting plays really well into who his character is. But he also said Mo “has no ballast.”

“Mo is just all instinct,” he explained. “It’s trying to make a magic trick work on top of a roller coaster; that’s kind of how he operates.”

And for Hall, it was nice to get a chance to play a character who could go toe-to-toe with the men, she said.

“I applaud all of the women on Wall Street and in areas that are male-dominated before me. But the guys are so great,” Regina Hall said of her executive producers and co-stars. “They are so amazing at taking a situation and finding the humor in it so it is a commentary but it’s not preachy or judgement so we get to really laugh and enjoy it.”

“Black Monday” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showtime.

 

[playahaitian]

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[playahaitian]

“Black Monday,” Reviewed: In Praise of Regina Hall and Little Else



By Troy Patterson

January 16, 2019

Dawn Darcy, played by Regina Hall, functions as the conscience of the show, groaning at the tasteless jokes before the audience can and articulating objections to the nonsensicality of the plot.

Photograph by Erin Simkin / Showtime

I’m perplexed by the business plan of the Jammer Group, the fictional nineteen-eighties financial firm embodying capitalist venality on “Black Monday” (Showtime). Though the Wall Street Journal hails it as the No. 11 trading firm in town, other characters deride it as a boiler-room operation. For reasons foreign to logic and essential to the season’s arc, its chief executive attempts a hostile takeover of Georgina, a designer-jeans company with a Jordache aesthetic and an enviable real-estate portfolio. The show, created by David Caspe and Jordan Cahan, counts on its audience to disregard detail and, instead, to attend to the broad strokes, such as the climate of Jammer’s office, with its stale air, clammy machismo, and ambient belligerence. An employee giving an orientation tour gestures toward a far wall: “That’s the window we throw stuff out of.” (Defenestration is a running theme: in the first episode, which opens on October 19, 1987—the dire trading day of the show’s title—a human soul hurtles from a skyscraper and crushes the roof of a floridly vulgar luxury car.)


The antihero of this scattershot comedy is Maurice Monroe (Don Cheadle), also known as Mo the Marauder, the Billy Ocean of trading, and the Freddy Krueger of Wall Street. Maurice differs from the stock figures of stock-market lore only in being a black man raised in an orphanage. He would be halfway to a provocative spoof of a nineteen-eighties banker if “Black Monday” were engaged in satire, rather than a sloppy sort of frat-bro camp. His patter flows with phrases familiar from “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Liar’s Poker.” A nebbish with a notepad shadows him to research an untitled Wall Street project for Oliver Stone. And I detect a touch of “American Psycho” gourmandizing when Maurice hears that his takeover target is a “white whale”: “I love whale,” he replies, citing “an off-menu humpback carpaccio that’s to die for.”

Maurice pays an exorbitant amount for the Georgina stake held by Lehman Brothers, here incarnated as twins Larry and Lenny Lehman (each played by Ken Marino as a haughty sack of old money, as if Randolph and Mortimer Duke, from “Trading Places,” had been Winklevossed by David Fincher), and he acquires the services of the scrappy Wharton grad Blair Pfaff (Andrew Rannells) after ruining his other job prospects by framing him for cocaine possession. Cocaine is tediously omnipresent on “Black Monday”: in a Warhol-style society portrait of Maurice with a straw to his nose, in the aggressive grandiosity of his employees, in the restlessness of the camera, in reiterated invocations of “Scarface,” in the sham euphoria of the rapid gags, in the excess of an aesthetic that produces tasteless period-specific jokes with wild profusion. A Len Bias reference might not feel like such a low blow if it were actually constructed as a joke.

Prefabricated referentiality is the substance of the series, you realize, while moaning at a shopworn visual gag about a cell phone the size of a bread box. When this sort of thing happens on “Pose,” it at least serves a show with sincere ambitions to capture its decade. Often, on “The Americans” and “glow,” excavation is evocation. But watching “Black Monday” is like being bludgeoned by a Rubik’s Cube. We are meant to take amusement from the sheer iteration, and increasing abstrusity, of the callbacks to floppy disks, shoulder pads, Cassingles, Crystal Pepsi, and Jane Krakowski in the original Broadway production of “Starlight Express.” (That some references are anachronistic compounds the frustration. Crystal Pepsi is, in fact, a product of the nineties. Were the writers thinking of Jolt Cola?) “Goddam, this is cool, like a McDLT,” a character says. Pulling a Gatsby at his own birthday party, Maurice fails to make the scene, but he assures us that it will feature tunes by Don Henley and m.c.ing by Joe Piscopo. At every opportunity, the show indulges in retrograde crassness for its own sake. At one point, Maurice motivates his troops by explaining their field as a zero-sum game: “One guy gets a dope chalet in Vail. Another guy has to tell his daughter that Christmas is cancelled because Santa Claus exploded in the Challenger.”

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, who deploys the same talent for performing chagrin that buoys Andrew Bujalski’s “Support the Girls.” The character—scolded by her bohemian parents as an amoral yuppie, patronized by her brain-surgeon fiancé and by everybody else—explores the life of a black woman on Wall Street with an intelligence elsewhere absent. She quavers persuasively as she remembers “all the times I was called ‘hot coffee,’ or was told to get coffee, or asked if I wanted cream in my coffee, which is fucking gross.” Moreover, 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.