The Book of Rannells: Black Monday: Season 1, Episode 7 – “65” (2019)

While it has a few issues, this is, on the whole, a hilarious episode.  Tons of great jokes, sequences, and bits, and some top-notch comedy from Andrew Rannells.  Things are heating up now!

Can’t get too much into specifics, as pretty much all the plots are reactions to stuff that happened last week.  Suffice it to say, Blair and Tiff’s wedding is getting closer, and with both parties wavering, Mo and Dawn are working overtime to keep those two crazy kids together.  While Dawn gets more than she bargained for at Tiff’s bachelorette party, Mo plans a wild night for Blair that gets wilder than even he expected.  Meanwhile, Keith finds himself in a tight spot and tries to gain the upper hand.

The timeline stuff is still bugging me a little.  Two major plots have basically been put on pause since the last episode (which took place almost two months ago,) and another is kind of getting lost in the shuffle of the time jumps.  For the sake of spoilers, I won’t get into the details, but while we’ve been getting bits of this latter storyline in short bursts, I’m still not sure how much is exactly going on with it – if what we see is really all there is to see, or if it’s an ongoing situation.

It doesn’t bother me as much here as it did last week, though.  In part, it’s not as pronounced, and what’s more, this episode is just outright funnier, which makes me more forgiving.  As I said in episode 4, putting Dawn and Tiff in the same room pretty much automatically leads to gold, and they have some great scenes here.  There’s some spectacular banter on 16 Candles (with a great callback from Mo later!), featuring headwear adorned with phalluses.

And Mo and Blair are just awesomely funny!  Everything these two get up to is hilarious, from Mo’s policy of never apologizing to white people (“Why?  Because Sting won all those Grammys instead of Thriller?”) to their argument about how much lessons from The A-Team should be applied to real life, and beyond.  It’s getting down to the wire for Mo, and, with plates wobbling in the air, he doubles down on the scheming and manipulation in a bid to stay afloat until he crosses the finish line.

I thought Andrew Rannells was hilarious last week, but he might be even funnier here.  The man is just a comedic treasure.  Blair has had it up to here with basically everything, and it shows big time.  His blasé reactions to some truly insane goings-on are amazing, and I like watching him vacillate between irritated, unimpressed, terrified, and pumped.  Rannells’s back-and-forth with Don Cheadle is so good; they’re two actors I wouldn’t have pictured playing off each other, but they’re just gold together.