Don Cheadle knows something about period pieces — "Boogie Nights," "The Rat Pack," "Devil in a Blue Dress" — and high-flying financial operators, like the brilliant, unscrupulous consultant Marty Kaan from Showtime's 2012-16 comedy "House of Lies." But Maurice "Mo the Marauder" Monroe, the coke-snorting, expletive-spewing trader at the center of Showtime's "Black Monday" (premiering Sunday, 10 EST/PST), is a new level of crazy, past or present, for Cheadle. Even Kaan would shake his head at Monroe's tactics: "I think Marty would rightly believe that Maurice was insane and probably wouldn't want to have anything to do with him," Cheadle says. More:Showtime adds 1980s comedy 'Black Monday' with Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, Andrew Rannells More:Winter TV preview: 10 new shows you won't want to miss In the dark comedy, Monroe is an unpredictable Wall Street wild man who runs an outsider firm that includes a razor-sharp trader (Regina Hall) and an innocent with a state-of the-art algorithm (Andrew Rannells). The tongue-in-cheek opening titles suggest they're responsible for the 1987 market crash. Cheadle, 54, an Oscar nominee for 2004's "Hotel Rwanda," chatted with USA TODAY about "Black Monday" and the future of his "Avengers" character, James Rhodes/War Machine. Question: How do the events of "Black Monday" in 1987 relate to today's world? Don Cheadle: It feels like the more things change, the more they stay the same. We're still dealing with questions about deregulation and skirting of rules that certain players seem to always be able to get away with. ... These kinds of things recur, also in the housing crash and the credit crash. It's always centered around people who can get away with skirting the issue and nobody seems to be held accountable. Q: What '80s props, clothing and styles stood out the most to you? Cheadle: The excess of the '80s is in every frame of the show. There's the Lamborghini limousine, (which) has neither the comfort of a limo nor the speed of a Lamborghini. Mo thinks he's crushing in that Adidas track suit with the dookie chains. I love that Mo wears Adidas (sneakers) with suits, because he never knows when he may have to stomp somebody out or kick a door open or run. It's functional wear. (As for ancient cellphone he carries), it was just a cumbersome brick (but) everyone thought they were cool when they had one. Now, it looks like the most ridiculous thing, like you're the Wichita lineman. Q: Do you think today's viewers will be startled by all the crude references to sex and drugs and the racial and ethnic comments and slurs? Cheadle: I think they will probably find it on some level kind of refreshing and get to live vicariously through characters who have no filter, because clearly everything is up for attack nowadays. I'm not fond of people saying they hate (political correctness), because I think P.C. is mostly about not being (jerks) and I'm completely good with that, but I think a lot of people are walking around on eggshells about everything. And these characters have no filter, they say whatever pops into their head. It was a bit of a balancing act, because you are depicting an era that was rife with that, but we are in a time where everyone is incredibly cautious. Every day on set, we'd try a joke and I'd look at (executive producers David Caspe and Jordan Cahan) and we'd inhale. And I'd be like, "I don't know about that one." Q: Does a younger Donald Trump factor into "Black Monday"? Cheadle: That was definitely something we discussed in the creation of the show: Is he someone we feature prominently? Is he someone who is in the margins? Or do we just completely ignore him … in an area and a time where a lot of it was all about him, especially in New York? I'm not saying which way it went, but that was absolutely the discussion we had. Q: Marvel's "Avengers: Endgame" is coming up in April. Looking beyond, would you be open to James Rhodes/War Machine getting his own series? Cheadle: That would be interesting. One of the fun things is that these characters can go on and we can find different origin stories or they can cross-pollinate and show up on each other's timelines. It's nothing we've specifically talked about, but it's something we have all generally kicked around. Q: What inspired you to become an activist about genocide and climate change? Cheadle: I became active on genocide during "Hotel Rwanda," which opened my eyes to a lot of things happening around the world that I was unaware of. ... I was invited to go with a Congressional delegation to Chad, to Darfur, to Sudan. Once I saw what was happening, I (had) to use whatever I had, celebrity, to try to shift the focus toward people who were suffering and issues not getting any sort of traction. … Climate change is something I just became aware of as many people have. The cameras get turned on and people want to know what we think. If we're doing that, let's talk about things that are pressing for everyone.<doc-sep>There’s so much going on that it’s difficult to separate “Black Monday’s” sharpest moments from its constant throwaway lines. Cleverness appears in each of the first three episodes (one bit in which Oliver Stone’s hired researcher shadows Mo to get ideas for the movie “Wall Street” is a nice, full basket of ’80s Easter eggs), only to be drowned out by all the frantic energy and half-attempts at humor that smother it. Rannells and Cheadle are good together — enough so that the series may yet settle down and find its way.<doc-sep>(CNN) — “Black Monday” squanders an impressive portfolio of assets, starting with its cast of Don Cheadle, Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells. A peculiar series that uses the historic stock-market crash of Oct. 19, 1987 as its backdrop – and mystery – the Showtime comedy doesn’t entirely go bust, but as a viewing proposition, offers a poor return on investment. 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.<doc-sep>David Caspe turned 8 in 1986, a year (almost to the day) before the stock market crash that is the ostensible subject of his new Showtime series, “Black Monday.” I mention that because, watching the show, it often feels like you’re seeing the ’80s through the eyes of a precocious youngster glued to the television. Designer jeans, Rae Dawn Chong, “Diff’rent Strokes,” Grandmaster Flash, Marion Barry, Michael Jackson, cocaine buffets. Cartoonish characters living large in cartoonish clothes. 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, the 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.)<doc-sep>
Meredith has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Meredith may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. Black Monday type TV Show network Showtime Thirty-one years after the worst stock market crash in Wall Street history, we’re finally getting answers thanks to the new Showtime series Black Monday, which flashes back to 1980s New York to follow the outsiders who took on the establishment and ended up causing the financial disaster. Well, we’re getting fictional answers. “To be up-front, we take every liberty,” admits Jordan Cahan (My Best Friend’s Girl), who created the show with Happy Endings mastermind David Caspe. “We did a bunch of research, but at the same time we kind of threw that out because it seemed like more fun.” Jokingly described by Cahan as “a little mystery, a lot of comedy, an immense amount of cocaine,” the series features a strong ensemble cast, including Andrew Rannells (Girls), Paul Scheer (The League), and Regina Hall (The Hate U Give), and is fronted by two-time Golden Globe winner Don Cheadle. The 54-year-old actor wasn’t looking to return to television so soon after wrapping Showtime’s House of Lies in 2016, but Black Monday’s potential quickly changed his mind. “You haven’t seen this before on TV,” he promises. And that goes double for his character, Wall Street maverick Maurice Monroe, who loves his cocaine and robot butler equally. “He’s a wild card,” says Cheadle. “He kind of lives on his insane gut and instinct. It’s fun to play a live wire like that.” Cahan and Caspe say Cheadle is the perfect actor to balance the comedy and serialized-drama aspects of the show’s multiple mysteries, such as the deadly one introduced in the first episode’s opening scene. Teases Caspe: “[It’s] kind of like the musical chairs of death.” Black Monday premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on Showtime. For more of Entertainment Weekly‘s Winter TV preview, buy it here now. Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW. Related content: