Black Monday, Sky Atlantic

Black Monday is the sort of show you hope came about after the maddest idea pitched at a long, boozy TV executive lunch ended up being the one that was greenlit. The truth is probably more prosaic, but we can stick with the fantasy because the plot is appropriately outlandish.

Here’s the recipe: take a real historical event – in this case the so-called Black Monday financial crash of October 19, 1987 – then speculate wildly about what (and, importantly, who) might have caused it while stirring in a great soundtrack and a procession of awesomely bad 1980s clothes and hairstyles.

As light snacks go, it’s as easy as pie. Nobody knows why the markets tanked that day, so the fiction that it had a lot to do with an Adidas-sporting, trash-talking, coke-snorting Wall Street trader known as Mo ‘The Marauder’ Monroe – played with unseemly relish by Don Cheadle – is as good a theory as any going.

Mo, described as “the Billy Ocean of trading” by the Wall Street Journal and “the Freddy Krueger of Wall Street” by somebody else with an even looser grip on pop culture, runs the 11th best firm in Manhattan. He called it The Jammer Group because it sounds like a hip-hop label. He has a robot butler which serves him cocaine for breakfast and when he visits the Lehman Brothers at their offices – they’re presented here as actual twin brothers – he opens the door with a karate kick John Shaft would be proud of.

Into Mo’s preposterous, macho, adrenaline-fuelled world came nerdy graduate Blair Pfaff (Andrew Rannells), an apparent no-hoper who just happened to have invented a trading algorithm which he was sure could make someone a fortune. Or lose one, of course. Banking on the first scenario being more likely Mo hired him and put him to work, though as episode one ended we saw that he also had ulterior motives.

It’s a fond, foul-mouthed mash-up of Trading Places and Wall Street and in Cheadle’s ebullient performance you can feel the spirit of both Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. But while writers Jordan Cahan and David Caspe gleefully front-load the script with off-colour gags about race and sexist jokes (many aimed at Regina Hall’s Dawn, Mo’s colleague and former squeeze) they do it with irony and satirical intent: aiming to match the best of the last decade’s TV period pieces this is as much about using the past as a prism through which to interrogate the present. Sure, the mobile phones are smaller – but how much has actually changed?

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