The Book of Rannells: Black Monday: Season 1, Episode 3 – “339” (2019)

This third episode is a fun one.  Plenty of wheeling and dealing, which looks to be par for the course for this show, and lots of good stuff for Blair/Andrew Rannells.

The group has some shares they need to hide away for a while, so Dawn organizes a divide-and-conquer approach to keep them off the records of the firm’s official holdings before quarterly reports are due.  Meanwhile, Mo has a particular need to establish a “father/son” relationship with Blair and takes the young trader out for a lavish night on the town.

The scheming is definitely becoming a regular occurrence, but it’s consistently entertaining.  The “hide the shares” shell game here is interesting, as it requires the traders to be underhanded in a fairly personal way, and it’s neat to see how they react to having to do that.  We learn quite a bit more about Dawn and where she comes from (the dynamic between her and her parents is really good,) as well as seeing more of the home life of another trader, Keith.

Mo wining and dining Blair is so much fun (after getting advice from the other guys on how to be a “father” to Blair, Mo decides that it’s just like dating, but without the sex.)  Obviously, there’s lots of showing off his decadent lifestyle, impressing upon Blair the fact that he’s rolling with the big boys now, but Blair isn’t entirely one to be “wooed” in the typical way – or at least what passes for typical in Mo’s mind, since some of his ideas are comically outrageous.  But Mo finds he also needs to relate to Blair on a personal level.  As self-involved as Mo is, he’s a shrewd judge of character too and usually has a pretty good eye for giving people what they want.

Rannells plays wonderfully well off of Don Cheadle, the naïve greenhorn to Mo’s master manipulator.  Rannells has awesome reaction shots throughout, and it’s fun to watch Blair basically clinging on for dear life over the course of the wild night that Mo takes him on.  His line reading on, “Maybe this is the cocaine talking, but can we get some more cocaine?” is hilarious.

There are also some great scenes between Blair and his fiancée Tiff (played by Casey Wilson.)  The two have such entertainingly-dysfunctional energy together, with a sex life that seems largely fueled by screaming insults at each other.  Here, as they argue over whether or not Tiff should buy them things with her dad’s money (Blair is against it, wanting to prove he can support them himself,) they argue hilariously/wrongly about whether Tiff’s parents would, ahem, “satisfy” her better than Blair can, and I love Blair’s dismayed reaction to Tiff asking if her dad can just buy them one trash compactor – “How many were you wanting?!”  These two bounce perfectly off each other and are so crazy together.

Side note:  the episode additionally features Melissa Rauch in a small role.  It took me a while to realize it was really her – I’m so used to seeing her on The Big Bang Theory that I didn’t recognize her at first without her “Bernadette” voice.