Irrational Exuberance

If only the NASDAQ controlled the Nielsens: Actors George Newbern and Malik Yoba try to make finance sexy in Bull

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More About

• Michael Chernuchin
• Stanley Tucci
• Malik Yoba
• Brooklyn
• Donald Moffat

Still, the performances here are good enough to raise your market cap. Donald Moffat glowers and schemes so adroitly that he doesn't need a mustache to twirl. And Stanley Tucci, on board for only six episodes thus far, doles out his usual puckish amorality with a fine sense of suspense, as if he himself can't decide whether he's going to do the right thing or sell his partners down the river for momentary gain. Tucci, playing the confusingly named Hunter Lasky (a Jewish Wasp?), is the firm's rainmaker. Broadening his portfolio, Hunter sleeps with the Alison Jeffers character on the side, and alone among these actors conveys the flexible moral accounting that gets such people through the day. "I learned a long time ago to forgive myself whenever I do something that's unforgivable," he explains.

In lines as incisive as that, Chernuchin hints at the kind of distance a subject like this cries out for. Not simple irony, necessarily, but some saving touch of unease that would puncture these economic and artistic bubbles--lest Greenspan get to them first.