Work In Progress and Black Monday both canceled at Showtime
The two series starred Chicago comedian Abby McEnany and Don Cheadle, respectively
Showtime announced that it was canceling two of its multi-season comedy shows tonight, with Variety reporting that both Black Monday and Work In Progress have been placed on the network’s chopping block and then, uh…chopped.
Black Monday was the longer-lived of the two shows, starring Don Cheadle as a flashy ’80s stockbroker whose various efforts to one-up his rivals purportedly ended up causing the titular 1987 event. The dark comedy co-starred a frankly ridiculous cast, including Andrew Rannells, Regina Hall, Paul Scheer, and Casey Wilson. The series was created by Jordan Cahan and David Caspe, of Happy Endings fame.
Here’s Erik Adams, reviewing the show’s first season back in 2019:
Black Monday is a pastiche of extremes, the ’80s in quotation marks, and that works for at least part of the show Caspe and Cahan have made, where the stars of UCB stages and podcast studios trade referential barbs in a comedy that’s part of the long, premium-cable tradition of creatively vulgar assholes solving expensive crises before the end credits roll.
Work In Progress, meanwhile, ran for two seasons on the network, with its most recent airing in October 2021. The series was co-created by, and starred, Chicago comedian Abby McEnany, a self-described “fat queer dyke” attempting to navigate life in her mid-40s. Co-written by Lilly Wachowski, the show also starred Karin Anglin, Celeste Pechous, Theo Germaine, and Julia Sweeney—the latter playing herself, and frequently reflecting on the impact her Saturday Night Live character Pat indirectly had on McEnany’s life.
Here’s an excerpt from A.V. Club TV editor Danette Chavez’s review of its first season:
McEnany is charming and self-effacing in the role, but she’s not being positioned as some saintly queer person. Her flaws are on display along with her desires, which include crushing on Chris (Theo Germaine), a server at the restaurant where Abby tries to pour her heart out to her sister. It’s just as significant a development as McEnany getting to play herself in a show on a premium cable network—not only does it remind us that queer folks are everywhere, but sometimes they’re fat, middle-aged, depressed, and/or self-involved.