What are we looking for from a summer television show?
Some fun would be nice. A zany twist. Maybe a performance or two where the actor goes just massively huge in a way that makes it seem like they think they’re on a different show than everyone else. Something that makes you ponder or speculate a little without retreating back into itself to leave you in a frustrating vortex of confusion. Nothing too heavy. Preferably very few shots of the protagonist driving around in the rain with that bluish tint on the screen that is supposed to convey moodiness and complexity but can sometimes come acr—zzzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry, I seem to have nodded off just thinking about that last one. You can see how this would be a problem.
Mostly, I think, the ideal summer show comes in somewhere around a B-plus. This is not a derogatory statement, even if a few decades of Peak Television might have conditioned us to believe otherwise. It’s quite the opposite, actually. There is honor in a B-plus. A B-plus is a grade that plops itself down in the shade between disappointing slacker and annoying try-hard. A B-plus is a grade usually given to C-students who are doing their best or A-students who are cruising along at a chill pace. This is an admirable quality in both people and television shows.
Apple TV+ has two of these fun little B-plus shows on its hands this summer. The first was Presumed Innocent, the whodunnit murder mystery starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a stressed-out and impossibly shredded prosecutor accused of killing a former coworker with whom he was having an affair. You would be forgiven for not clocking this as a pulpy B-plus show at first glance. It had all the markers of a fancy prestige drama on paper: star-studded cast, serious subject matter, a story based on a book that had already been adapted into a Harrison Ford movie in the 1990s. It even had a few shots with that ubiquitous bluish tint that I made fun of a couple paragraphs back. There was an understandable temptation to take this all very seriously.
But as Presumed Innocent unfolded, it revealed itself to be more beach read than highbrow drama. Jake was giving the Full Jake Gyllenhaal (compliment). Peter Sarsgaard was turning his character into a despicable little weasel through a masterclass of smirks. O-T Fagbenle was doing unplaceable voice work, there was a new wild twist every other episode, Ruth Negga was popping up every now and then to keep everything from spinning off into the atmosphere. It was a blast, honestly, all the way up through the wild twist ending. Was it the best show I’ve ever seen? I mean, probably not. But was it a hoot to watch with someone in an air-conditioned room and talk about how much I hated Tommy Molto while the sun turned the sidewalk into a hibachi outside? It really was. A second season has been picked up already and I have no earthly clue how they plan to make that work, but I am vibrating with excitement at the audacity to even try. I kind of hope the show runs seven seasons and all of them premiere in July — what registers as charming and wacky in sweaty weather might not feel the same in sweater weather — and every one opens with Jake’s character getting accused of a new murder. Why not do it all, you know?
So that’s one way for a summer show to get to this B+ sweet spot, the yelling and twists and Bill Camp furrowing his brow at the chaos emerging around him. There are other ways, too. This brings us to Bad Monkey, Apple TV+’s latest series, one that asks the simple question “What if Vince Vaughn played a version of Fletch who lived in Florida and had to work as a restaurant inspector because he was suspended from his job as a homicide detective for committing a golf cart based assault on his lover’s husband.†A question that, it turns out, we should have been asking for a while now, mostly because the answer appears to be “it would be delightful.â€
This sucker does not back into its B-plus summer bona fides. It gets there purely, honestly, as it should given that its source material is a book by beach-read icon Carl Hiaasen. It’s got everything you could want out of humid August viewing: severed limbs, curses, wise-cracking detectives, coroners eating mango popsicles, a plot that zigs and zags across the boundaries of credulity, Michelle Monaghan, all of it. Hell, Vince Vaughn’s character gets his badge and gun taken away from him due to a series of loose-cannon shenanigans in the very first episode. The season isn’t even halfway over as of this writing, but everyone here — most notably showrunner Bill Lawrence, who nails the tone in a way decades of experience makes easier — knows exactly what they’re doing and they’re doing it well. It’s hard to ask for much more.
Now that I think about it, maybe this should just become Apple TV+’s whole niche, like how Prime Video is trying to corner the market on elevated Dad Shows. It has a few other shows on its roster that fit the criteria. Ted Lasso was a sweet little B-plus comedy straight through, with heart and profanity and mustaches to soothe the soul. Slow Horses is back in early September — still summer, technically! — for a fourth season of Gary Oldman’s flatulent spy thwarting the most awful people you’ve ever seen. Even The Morning Show is kind of a B-plus show sometimes, at least in an “excitable C-student with annoying parents honestly thinks it’s doing A-plus work which would be kind of annoying if it weren’t also charming to see how their overstimulated hormone-ravaged brain works†way. Again, a lot of ways to get to the same destination.
Either way, let’s all sit back and enjoy this for now. The days are starting to get shorter. The mornings are getting chillier. The time for enjoying a goofy little summer show is coming to an end. Soon enough, the real world will have that god-forsaken blue-ish tint outside as the sun begins setting at 4:30 over the leafless trees. The time for mischievous primates and raging Gyllenhaals will have passed us by for another year. Please stop and appreciate it while you can.