The big-money, high-stakes jockeying brings to mind a significantly better Showtime series, "Billions," with the main difference here being the late-'80s setting, which informs the boys-will-be-boys atmosphere, where traders brazenly snort cocaine in the office and generally behave in unbridled frat-boy fashion.
Leading the parade is Cheadle's Maurice Monroe, a.k.a. Mo the Marauder, who runs his Wall Street firm with the kind of anything-for-a-buck abandon that gives money men a bad name. King plays Dawn Darcy, every bit his equal, but held back by being a woman, which explains her complicated relationship with Mo, including a personal history that she's keeping from her current boyfriend.
The more central relationship to the plot, though, involves Blair Pfaff ("Girls" alum Rannells), a wide-eyed, somewhat naïve newcomer to this brutal take-no-prisoners world, who has developed a trading algorithm that still needs to work out a few bugs.
Mo nevertheless takes him under his wing -- not because he sees anything special in the kid, but rather because he recognizes a way to exploit him, playing a shady angle that involves Blair's girlfriend (Casey Wilson).
Directed by the team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (whose mini-TV empire already includes AMC's "Preacher" and Hulu's "Future Man"), this half-hour show revels in excess, and tries to build suspense around the dark comedy by counting down toward the market crash. The ostensible hook is that what happened has never been adequately explained, offering the tantalizing prospect of finding out the cause.
Cheadle, Hall and the supporting players lustily sink their teeth into these morally bankrupt characters, but "Black Monday" doesn't even make them particularly interesting as antiheroes. Nor does the big-buck finagling rival smarter versions of this material, leaving the '80s excesses as the program's main calling card.
One of the show's conceits involves opening with a glimpse of what will happen when the crash comes, leading into each episode by flashing a chyron on the screen that suggests the show is going to count down to that big moment.
The first episode begins with the crash before flashing back "One year earlier," but after a few tedious Sunday nights, the prospect of hanging around for all of "Black Monday" simply looks like a different kind of bad bet.
"Black Monday" premieres Jan. 20 at 9 p.m. on Showtime.
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