Relationship Spotlight: Maurice Monroe & Blair Pfaff (Black Monday)

*Some Blair-Mo-related spoilers.*

In our Book of Rannells chronology, I’ve skipped a couple previously-reviewed projects because I didn’t have much more to say, so we’ve made it back to season 3 of Black Monday. The cast chemistry is one of the show’s best qualities, and that’s especially true among the three main characters. Mo, Dawn, and Blair are excellent to watch as a trio as well as any duo that can be made between the three. Today, we’re looking at Blair with Mo.

Just within the pilot, our understanding of Mo and Blair’s dynamic changes more than once. Mo is the fast-talking Wall St. hotshot, a still-little fish who’s more than ready to take over the whole big pond. He has confidence to burn and next to no shame, and even when he’s lying transparently, he does it with gusto. By contrast, Blair is a fresh-out-of-business school hayseed, browbeaten by his high-maintenance fiancée and severely lacking in the swagger department. He has plenty of book smarts, having designed a whiz-bang trading algorithm, but he’s never set foot on the trading floor before. By all accounts, he’s either someone Mo wouldn’t even notice or someone Mo would eat for breakfast.

Mo takes the latter approach, blowing up Blair’s fledgling career over an accidental slight and making his name toxic on Wall St. But punching-bag Blair, pushover Blair, shows a bit of a spine when he comes to the Jammer Group to confront Mo about it. Mo challenges him to prove that his algorithm really works, and when Blair loses the bet, Mo takes his car but offers him a job. This adds another wrinkle, with Mo still belittling Blair and pushing him around but also showing just a hint of “this kid’s got potential.”

But the first episode isn’t even over yet. In the last scene, we discover the real reason Mo wants Blair around: he’s engaged to a member of the Georgina family, and the enormous, game-changing plan Mo wants to execute depends on getting his hands on her shares. He masterminded their whole encounter on the trading floor to ensure that Blair would get blacklisted with every other firm and have no choice but to turn to the Jammer Group. Mo then sets the next phase of his plan in motion, taking Blair under his wing (in a quintessentially-Mo way) to butter him up and secure his trust/his fiancée shares. The slick Wall St. veteran showing the naïve kid the ropes, and all the while Mo’s playing him for an angle.

Things take another flip when it’s revealed that, after Blair gets wise to Mo’s plan midway through the season, he decides to double-cross Mo, running the Georgina play himself. It’s a little bit “the student becomes the master” and a big helping of “the mark gets the upper hand.” The hard-knocks Wall St. lessons Mo taught Blair sank in a bit too well. It’s a cold, triumphant Blair who calmly explains how he swiped Mo’s plan, and his firm, out from under him.

This positions Blair in a more antagonistic role relative to Mo, even though, of course, Mo had tried to play him first. It means fewer chances for Don Cheadle and Andrew Rannells’s excellent foil-chemistry with each other, but whenever they are in each other’s orbit, they really get to let loose. Blair rubs Mo’s failings in his face while Mo is abundantly clear about his hatred for Blair. When they haphazardly find themselves working together again, it’s a cycle of seeing who will go farther, who’ll double-cross who first, and who can get in the best zingers.

And yet, there’s this small part of them that never really stops being in sync. As much as they’re frequently at each other’s throats, they weirdly kind of work well together, and that pops up in unexpected moments where I think they both surprise each other with their somehow-still-enduring bond. One of my favorite moments in season 2 is when Blair comes to the Jammer Group late at night, at his lowest point, and Mo runs into him. Both keep each other way at arm’s length, but there are just these little moments of truth that get through between them, and by the end of that encounter, Mo is ready to include Blair in his plan to get them all out of some majorly hot water.

Blair spends a lot of season 3 apart from Mo, which is a shame. I said in my episode reviews that, while he’s hugely entertaining in his early plots with Tiff, the season really starts to sing once he gets back in Mo (and Dawn’s) orbit. There’s an amoral chaos there, and it’s great to see the way they continually bullshit one another while somehow getting real at the same time. If we don’t get a season 4, I’m okay with where these two end up, but of course I’d love to see more of what they get up to together.

Relationship Spotlight: Blair Pfaff & Roger Harris (Black Monday)

Out here in the present, season 3 of Black Monday wrapped last month, but in my Book of Rannells chronology, I’m back up to season 2. Since I’ve already reviewed all those episodes, I thought I’d revisit the relationship between Blair and a certain congressman (Blair/Roger-related spoilers.)

Given that Blair enters season 2 having only recently figured out that he’s gay, it’s not much of a stretch to guess where things are headed when his lobbying efforts put him in the path of Roger, a “family values” conservative whose support is crucial in passing bank deregulation, which will make Blair and Dawn’s trading shenanigans easier and more lucrative. At first, Roger seems like a hard sell, straight-talking and no-nonsense, impervious to Blair’s schmoozing efforts. Blair is thrown into a tizzy as he frantically tries to race through his talking points while Roger is deigning to give him the time of day, but it soon turns out that there are other, sexier ways to secure Roger’s vote.

So, yeah. Republican congressman whose marriage is a major part of his brand, whose father-in-law is a fire-and-brimstone televangelist making bank, turns out to be secretly closeted? Not too surprising, especially when he’s played by Tuc Watkins, Andrew Rannells’s costar from The Boys in the Band (and real-life boyfriend, though I didn’t realize that until partway through season 2.) We can see where things are going to go: Blair and Roger get embroiled in a steamy affair that they have to hide from Roger’s wife and father-in-law, clinch moments where Roger has to decide whether his feelings for Blair mean more than his image/reputation, etc.

But even if the track is clearly laid, it’s still an interesting journey to watch the characters go through it. I always enjoy Blair’s laughable efforts to “butch it up” (there’s a scene where he casually refers to a golf club as something like “the old whacking pole,” and it kills me,) and the romantic angst over their secret relationship is predictable but effective.

What I really like are how the darker, more selfish aspects of the two characters show up in relation to one another. Blair and Roger both genuinely care about each other, but they’re both also using each other – Blair to get the deregulation bill pushed through the House, Roger to fund his reelection campaign with money from Blair’s firm. All their interactions are half genuine, half mercenary, but even as each uses the other, both feel so hurt at the notion of being used by the other. When Blair feels that Roger is just treating him like a walking wallet, he’s devastated (and I’ve been following Rannells’s work long enough to know he gives excellent devastated-face,) and his hurt leads him down a rash road.

Things between these two are clearly headed for implosion nearly from the beginning. That might at first seem to be because they appear so different, but actually, it’s because they’re both so similar. There’s some emotional chicken involved (shades of Marvin and Whizzer from Falsettos,) where neither wants to be vulnerable enough to let on how much they care, which only leaves both of them insecure about where they stand with the other. And ultimately, both are self-serving above all else. Incapable of putting the other first, it rips them apart in the end. Roger breaks Blair’s heart and Blair, in a moment of emotional impulsivity, lashes out in a way he can never take back.

I will say, though, that the final end to their relationship really bugs me. Blair’s retaliation against Roger is to give Roger’s father-in-law proof of their affair, which the reverend then leaks to the press. Roger, in part because of the implications for his political career and in part because he assumes Blair was the one who released the video, hangs himself.

I alluded to it at the time, albeit without spoilers, but I found that so disappointing. Black Monday has so often been a show that keeps you on your toes, that zigs when you think it’s gonna zag. To have the final nail pounded into a queer relationship with a closeted gay man’s suicide isn’t the shocking cliffhanger the episode seems to think it is. Instead, it’s regrettably typical. Even though, as I said, Blair and Roger’s relationship starts from a very familiar beat, it moves in much more interesting directions throughout their time on the show together, and I don’t like that they’re given such a clichéd Tragic Gay End.

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First of all, Hot Toys is doing a premium Wenwu action figure for Shang-Chi? I should not be looking at those pictures. I already have one very cool Wenwu figure that guards my Doctor Who DVDs – I do not need a $250 1/6-scale figure, no matter how hyper-realistic it is. (Those eyes, though….)

More nice words from other cast members. I like Simu Liu’s story about how nervous he was about accidentally hitting Tony Leung Chiu-wai during their fight scenes (with Leung trying to reassure him during rehearsals,) and Fala Chen has some really lovely things to say about working for him. There’s also a brief Leung sighting in this goofy on-set video of Awkwafina shuttling some of her costars around in one of those golf-cart-looking vehicles that they use on movie sets. Leung and Awkwafina have pretty much polar-opposite energies as celebrities, which makes for an awkward but sweet little exchange between them – a man after my own introvert heart!

The Book of Rannells: Black Monday: Season 3, Episode 10 – “One!” (2021)

Season finale! At this time, we don’t know whether or not the show’s been renewed. I’m hoping for more, of course, but this year more than any other, the last episode could serve just as well as a season or series finale. If this is the last we get to see of these lowlifes, they went out swinging!

The gang has a plan to catch a killer. Or rather, they have an elaborate setup and multiple plans with varying levels of sense and complexity. Do any of their schemes have any hope of actual success, and will they live to tell about it?

Not too many details here, dodging spoilers. The finale serves up danger, hilarity, emotional stakes, and copious bickering, and everyone gets something fun to do. There’s an awesome argument over assorted chemical compounds that aren’t sodium pentothal, Keith isn’t in favor of the plans that involve dangling him in front of their chief suspect and waiting to see if the guy tries to murder him, and a serious lack of shrimp. I enjoy how the mystery shakes out. It takes a few twists that surprise without feeling completely out of the blue.

I love this exchange between Dawn and Keith: “Motherfucker, knock! I could’ve had my pussy out!” “Dawn, I’m gay.” “Then you really don’t need to see it.” Also great? This so-true remark from Yassir – “Well, that was beautiful but tonally inconsistent, which is pretty on brand for us.”

Some good stuff for Blair. Between this show and Girls, Andrew Rannells has plenty of experience depicting “comedically off his head on coke,” but it never gets old. I get a huge kick out of Blair and Mo hatching plans while high as kites, as well as Blair snapping, “Only me and Mo are Plan Boys, you dumb bitch!” I also really like a bit where someone is trying to describe what Blair is like as a husband. They falter at “sexually…”, grasping for a descriptor, and Blair euphemistically offers up “…undemanding?”

On the whole, this was a good season for Rannells. I wish he’d had more screentime with Don Cheadle and Regina Hall, since that’s consistently where the magic happens, but he was still a lot of fun in the episodes where he was off in his own plots. Blair’s storyline offered up some good skewering of the GOP – all the NRA stuff was hilarious, and I wasn’t expecting the “Superman” bit at all. Additionally, we got some actual introspection from Blair on his choices and the consequences therein, which led to some good dramatic material, and Rannells’s comedic reactions remain topnotch. Like I said, if this is it, we’re ending in a pretty good place, but I do hope we get to see more of Rannells’s great performance in this bonkers show.