Black Monday: Season Two (2020) * 1/2 (on Showtime)

Starring:  Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, Andrew Rannells, Paul Scheer, Casey Wilson, Ken Marino

What drives the people in season two of Black Monday isn't greed or money, but revenge.  They want to even the score, and come up with frankly ridiculous, ultra-contrived schemes in which to do so. 
These characters live to screw each other over, and after a while it is a fool's errand to figure out who is doing what to whom and why.   We've long stopped caring, and that is fatal to the series.

Season one ended with the infamous 1987 Black Monday in which the stock market collapsed and Maurice Monroe (Cheadle) fled as his company was being raided by the FBI and his silent partner is chucked out of a window.   Season two begins, and Maurice has relocated to Florida while his not-so-silent partner/unrequited love interest Dawn (Hall) now runs his firm on Wall Street, seemingly flourishing in the months following Black Monday.

Maurice plots his comeback while evading the FBI and law enforcement.   He has help from the now
openly gay and openly bald Keith (Scheer).   Also in the mix is Blair (Rannells), Maurice's protege from season one who tries to negotiate his way through a sham marriage to Tiff (Wilson), while romancing a connected Congressman who he thinks can help him gain power on Wall Street.

Homosexuality is a common theme in season two.   Blair and Keith are embracing theirs, while also using it as a way to blackmail others.    Maurice uses a lot of cocaine and homoerotic humor to plot and manipulate schemes which depend on such arbitrary happenings as the outcome of traffic accidents.  And if those don't work, he has plans B or C which are equally unlikely, but somehow keep working out for him.   But, why should we care if Maurice or the rest of the loathsome characters get anything they want?   They should all wind up in prison. 

What Black Monday fails to understand is if there is no rooting interest for the viewer, then all of
this backstabbing and double and triple and quadruple crosses are for naught.   The show stopped being about the characters a long time ago, and thinks we care more about the game.   If there is a season three, it will be more of the same, so count me out.