The Book of Rannels: Black Monday: Season 1, Episode 6 – “122” (2019)

This one was a little uneven for me.  It has some great, hilarious scenes, but it also veers into too-muchness in places, which keeps it from being altogether successful.  You can tell we’re in the second half of the season, though, as pretty much every plot is ramping up.

Blair and Tiff’s engagement party is ground zero for a lot of different conflicts to boil over.  Thrown by Mo, it brings together Tiff’s high-society friends/family with the rowdy traders from the firm, which sets things off-kilter from the start.  Throw in Blair dealing badly with a personal crisis and an uneasy ceasefire between Mo and Dawn over past events coming to a head, and it makes for a perfect storm of a party.  Meanwhile, Keith takes drastic measures to go after what he wants.

Like I said, there are points here where it’s just too much.  I get that this is a comedy, and an outrageous one at that, and so sometimes going over-the-top totally works (a subplot with two minor traders waking up to an insane situation does this perfectly.)  At others, though, it’s just that:  over-the-top.  At those points, it stops being hilarious and starts being a little exhausting.

We also run into problems with the timeframe here.  Each episode title indicates how many days we are from Black Monday, and the jump between last week’s episode (“243”) and this week’s (“122”) is the largest to date, with about four months having gone by.  And yet, a number of character issues seem to have just been in a holding pattern since then, a bit similar to how Branson and Lady Sybil would have a big conversation on Downton Abbey and in the next episode, 6+ months later, nothing would have changed between them.

It’s especially noticeable with Blair’s plot.  There was a small confrontation with Keith in the last episode that has a big hand in fueling the personal crisis he’s dealing with here, but both Blair’s interactions with Keith and his own internal struggle feel a week old, not four months.  That makes what the story shows us jar a little with what it tells us.

But despite those issues, other parts of the episode are a ton of fun.  The engagement party has Tiff in ultra-Type-A mode, and her haughty social circle makes for some fun scenes, especially Mo and Dawn faux-making-nice with Tiff’s loaded, racist parents – I also love the goofy dietary demands of all of Tiff’s insufferable friends.  The aforementioned “waking up in an insane situation” subplot is really funny too.

And even though the timeline stuff is still hinky, Blair/Andrew Rannells is pretty hilarious.  His way of dealing with his issues is to drink heavily, not an ideal strategy for a fancy party.  This leads to all sorts of delightful drunk acting from Rannells, including musings on “sniglets” (portmanteaus/mashup words,) wildly inappropriate remarks to Tiff’s friends, and an impromptu song snippet about how drunk he is.  The physical comedy is fantastical here – I could watch him awkwardly clamber out of a bathtub all day.