“Just be patient” might be the most dreaded phrase in streaming television, so when a narrator—scruffy fisherman Captain Fitzpatrick (Tom Nowicki)—utters it at the outset of Bad Monkey, it’s reasonable to get nervous.
Fortunately, there’s no cause for alarm, as Bill Lawrence’s Apple TV+ adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 best-seller hits the ground running and maintains its jaunty pace for the entirety of its 10 episodes. A breezy and amusing Florida detective yarn that has personality to spare and never overstays its welcome, it’s a vehicle tailor-made for its leading funnyman Vince Vaughn—and one of the year’s sunniest surprises.
In a role that plays to his every strength, Vaughn is Andrew Yancy, a good-hearted Miami cop with a pesky habit of getting in his own way. At the start of Bad Monkey, which premieres August 14, Andrew’s comical assault on the abusive husband of his current paramour Bonnie Witt (Michelle Monaghan) has gotten him suspended from the force.
This comes on the heels of another incident that resulted in his relocation to the Keys, where he’s now wiling away the days sitting behind his house, staring at his majestic ocean view and the deer that roam his property. Those sights, alas, have been marred by the enormous yellow monstrosity being constructed next door, whose presence is so unwanted that Andrew can’t resist repeatedly undermining the sleazy real estate agent, Evan Shook (Alex Moffat), who’s trying to sell it.
Andrew’s attempts at luxuriating in peace and quiet are further interrupted by the arrival of his former partner Rogelio Burton (John Ortiz), who has a task from the sheriff that might earn Andrew reinstatement on the force.
A severed arm (its middle finger permanently raised courtesy of rigor mortis) has been found by a tourist fishing expedition, and Andrew’s boss—not wanting another headache—wants him to take it to Miami to find out if it’s related to any missing persons cases. Andrew agrees to this request and visits medical examiner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), who has only bad news for Andrew and yet is so sharp and fetching that it makes the trip worthwhile. The feeling, it turns out, is mutual, since Rosa is taken by Andrew’s honesty and confidence, not to mention his pushy sense of humor, with his quips coming a mile a minute and as goofy as they are self-deprecating.
Andrew is a typical Vaughn character, as well as an archetypal postmodern sleuth: messy, reckless, insubordinate, cocky, and guided by a fundamentally noble desire to see justice served. As embodied by the star, he’s a wisecracking rebel whose rule-breaking is a response to the absurdities and illogicalities of contemporary life, and whose nagging compulsion to do right is countered by his relaxed demeanor and wry and laid-back perspective. That outlook is a byproduct of his dad (Scott Glenn), whose wisdom comes from a magical manatee that speaks to him at the bottom of a lake.
At once sardonic and sweet, troublesome and reliable, and easygoing and determined, Andrew is a guy whose nonchalance belies his conviction, and Vaughn—aided by a steady stream of rat-a-tat-tat one-liners—makes him a winning slacker hero in the mold of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.
For his troubles, Andrew doesn’t get his old job back; instead, he’s made the Key’s new restaurant inspector. That thankless assignment, however, doesn’t stop him from investigating the severed arm, whose owner Nick Stripling is ruled dead by boating accident. The shadiness of Nick’s wife Eve (Meredith Hagner) piques Andrew’s curiosity, as do his subsequent dealings with Nick’s recovering-addict daughter Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence).
It’s not long before his poking around leads him to the Bahamas island of Andros, where layabout playboy fisherman Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet) is dealing with Eve’s predatory developer boyfriend Christopher (Rob Delaney), who plans to build a lavish resort on the very stretch of beach that Neville calls home. Neville, whose best friend is a monkey named Driggs, wants Christopher gone. To accomplish this goal, he enlists the services of the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), an Obeah-practicing witch who, along with her grandmother Ya-Ya (L. Scott Caldwell), provides supernatural services for a price.
Also featuring Zach Braff as a pill-popping surgeon and David St. Louis as a hired henchman named Egg, Bad Monkey is overflowing with colorful tropical clowns who fall short of being caricatures, and they’re the engine that keeps the show running as it wends its way through a circuitous mystery that involves murder, fraud, and unlikely resurrections.
Showrunner Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso) faithfully captures the loopiness and lethality of Hiaasen’s many characters, and by employing dry, meta narration that jokily comments on the action while simultaneously deepening one’s understanding of these figures’ interior lives, he lends the proceedings a novelistic quality. Rather than a hand-holding device, Fitzpatrick’s running commentary—reminiscent of Sam Elliot’s voiceover from The Big Lebowski—is key to the material’s comical spirit.
Scored to cover versions of Tom Petty classics, Bad Monkey ambles along with just the right amount of urgency, its surprises and twists materializing almost as regularly as Vaughn’s jibes. Aided by lively supporting turns from the entire cast (in particular, Hagner, Delaney, and Turner-Smith), it’s consistently funny and charismatic, and Vaughn and Martinez’s banter-heavy chemistry allows it to be reasonably romantic as well.
There’s nothing strained about the series, and that also goes for its story, whose myriad men and women are driven (and thwarted) by need, greed, and a hunger for a better life—even if their visions of that superior existence differ greatly. Lawrence strikes a sturdy balance between light and dark, ridiculous and serious, and so does Vaughn, whose hero is all the more charming for seeming uninterested in being seen as one.
Like every other streaming effort, Bad Monkey could have handled its business in fewer episodes; seven or eight installments, rather than 10, probably would have been ideal. Nonetheless, Vaughn’s excellent work makes spending additional time in Andrew’s company anything but a chore. If Apple TV+ were smart, it would capitalize on the series’ ending and immediately put a second season into production.
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