Black Monday Season 2

 2020, created by Jordan Cahan, David Caspe - Showtime/Crave

The first season of Black Monday was, frankly, outrageous.  Just coke-addled, off-the-wall bananas following the oh-so-heightened adventures of a black man, a black woman, and a gay man running a investment firm on Wall Street at the end of the 1980's, culminating in the trio perpetuating a scam that crashes the stock market.

Season 2 deals with the fallout, as Don Cheadle's Mo takes the fall and goes on the run to Miami with Keith (Paul Scheer) where he dreams of just escaping.  Keith, meanwhile, gets caught up in drug dealing on the boardwalk with, unsavory results.  Dawn (Regina Hall) and Blair (Andrew Rannells) are trying to keep the Jammer Group afloat, but Dawn struggles for respect (particularly after Black Monday) and Blair's too coked up and obsessed with his new secret relationship with a congressman to do much actual work.

They come up with a plan with the remaining Lehman brother (Ken Marino) to invest banks, but their investment goes south when Mo finds out and (in trying to help) ruins the deal with a fake robbery gone horribly, horribly awry (definitely the high point of a constantly outrageous season).  Then Mo returns to New York, trying to help Dawn and win her heart, only to consistently get in her way.  Keith, meanwhile, teams up with the Lehman brother to help take down their nemesis, the Jammer Group.

It's a farce.  The whole thing is farcical, and it's a show that pushes the boundaries of what people can realistically do, or how they should act, or react in any given situation all for some exceptionally entertaining and ludicrous comedy.  After the bank robbery episode, it felt like I was overwhelmed by the show, and I took a break for too long, but returned after seeing Don Cheadle in No Sudden Move.  Cheadle is always great, but Hall is also stellar. The entire cast is fun, and it's a show where you can never predict what its going to do or where its going next.  It's smart, it's funny, and it's ethically compromised, but at its heart it's about people trying to make space for themselves in a domain where they normally weren't allowed, and the toll that takes on them.