Black Monday, Showtime’s new raunchy dark comedy about the lead-up to the infamous October 1987 stock market crash, is far from prudish. The Don Cheadle, and Regina Hall–led show blatantly and gleefully boasts gags about cocaine, prostitutes, and twin brothers who totally have sex with each other, but series creators Jordan Cahan and David Caspe don’t plan on going full Wolf of Wall Street.
“There will never be female nudity on this show,†Cahan said during the show’s Television Critics Association press day on Thursday in Pasadena. “Despite the fact that that was a huge piece of that world … we are a comedy and we don’t necessarily want to contribute to that.â€
Male nudity, though? Cahan clarified that Black Monday is fine with that — plus, in the series premiere, they already put to use a penis prosthetic.
With that burning question out of the way, an even bigger one remains: How will this show continue past a single season? After all, the episode titles are numbered based on how many days the characters — a ragtag group of second-tier Wall Street traders — are away from the Black Monday crash. “There are things that came right after [the crash] in ’88 and ’89, like the Savings and Loan Crisis,†Cahan said. “So if we were going to play with that dynamic, there’s a lot of fun pieces that we can play with and we can satirize.â€
But, as co-star Paul Scheer joked during the panel, they just have to make sure all those events happened on a Monday.