About halfway through the first episode of Apple TV+’s new series, Bad Monkey, the narrator (Tom Nowicki) asks us to be patient, promising that “it will all make sense eventually.†But do I really care if it makes sense eventually? The reassurance is nice, but what if I’m just happy to go along on the ride? With a stellar cast, an amazing soundtrack, and a ton of laugh-out-loud moments, it already feels like this is a show where the journey is the destination.
Bad Monkey is adapted from Carl Hiaasen’s cult-classic novel of the same name. Set in Miami, Key West, and the island of Andros in the Bahamas, it’s a deeply humorous, sprawling mystery that enlists a list of eccentric characters longer than the severed arm at the story’s center. On the heels of two hit shows for Apple TV+ (Ted Lasso and Shrinking), creator Bill Lawrence antes up for an adaptation for the streamer. And, if the first episode is any indication, he’s got a flair for bringing the page to the screen. The series utilizes an omniscient narrator to bring Hiaasen’s distinctive voice to the show and punctuate the proceedings with wickedly funny observations on the inner lives of the wild characters. I know it’s only one episode in, but so far, I’m enjoying everything this show is serving up.
Central to the narrative is the wry, wisecracking detective, Andrew Yancy, played by Vince Vaughn. As we all know, Vaughn has had a very successful career playing wry, wisecracking dudes, and his vibe clicks with Yancy’s. (Your mileage may vary if you aren’t totally into Vince Vaughn doing his Vince Vaughn thing, but I dig it.) Yancy is like an antihero without any off-putting grit. Yeah, he’s antagonizing the real-estate agent (Alex Moffat) who’s building a hideous yellow monstrosity next to his serene property, but the agent is a total douchebag. And sure, his girlfriend, Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan), is married, but she seems pretty chill about the whole situation (well, until she finds a bloody arm in his freezer). Yancy is an affable and content man. He’s pretty happy with his life, except for the fact that he’s been suspended from his beloved job as a homicide detective due to the fact that he rammed Bonnie’s husband’s golf cart into the ocean after he saw him slap Bonnie. This is an objectively hilarious thing to do to someone else — especially a man whose wife is cheating on him with YOU — and we’re also kind of on Yancy’s side here. Every man who hits his wife should 100 percent be cast into the sea; Yancy is just out here doing God’s work.
As the episode opens, Yancy’s old partner, Rogelio (John Ortiz), comes to him with a proposition: Bring a random severed arm to Miami and try to dump it on the coroner there. Yancy is intrigued. He knows he’s getting handed crap jobs under the table while he’s under suspension, but he’s also game for anything that brings him back to his old beat. So he heads up to Miami, stops by the morgue, and immediately engages in a heavy flirtation with the hottie coroner, Dr. Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez). Yancy instantly has a flirty rapport with almost everyone he meets, but this one somehow feels different. By the end of the episode, these two enthusiastically exchanged mango popsicles close to rapidly decaying body parts, and that sure felt like a twisted version of soulmates. Rosa says she has a boyfriend, but anything could happen in the next nine episodes, right?
Rosa quickly informs Yancy that Miami PD is not missing an arm from a white dude, but she has a curious mind, too. She extracts some suspiciously small shark teeth from the wounded area and also notices that there’s a watch missing from the wrist. She’s interested, but she’s also a busy gal, so she sends Yancy and his little arm, too, back to Key West. On the way home, Rogelio suggests that Yancy dump the arm in a swamp, but Yancy is too principled a cop and too invested in the curious story behind the arm to just feed it to the gators at this point.
And it’s a good thing he sticks it in the freezer with his leftovers because a woman named Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner) comes looking for it pretty much the very next day. Yancy gets saddled with the task of dropping it off to her in a random parking lot. I agree with Eve that this very much feels like a drug deal. Why didn’t she have to go to the station to pick it up? At the very least, wouldn’t she have to fill out some paperwork claiming it as hers? But never mind. The shady pickup situation gives us a fun exchange inside Eve’s car in which Yancy knows she’s hiding something, and he also gets to react to her telling him that her husband, Nick, named his boat “Summer’s Eve†after her. Maybe that not-so-fresh feeling knocked Nick off his boat?
Yancy gets officially fired from the force for questioning Eve, but after seeing Mrs. Stripling’s weird reaction, he can’t let things go. So, he heads to Nick’s funeral and does some snooping. Not only does he encounter two FBI agents there, but he also runs into Nick’s jaded daughter, Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence). Caitlin is full of fire and doesn’t take any shit. She is convinced Eve killed her dad, but she has no evidence. She also hasn’t spoken to her father in over a year. To Eve — a catty trophy wife — she’s obviously the stepdaughter from hell, and she probably doesn’t want her poking around in her life.
This episode bounces between two storylines and, initially, Eve is the only one we see in both. As she’s grieving Nick’s death, we see her wander by a man named Neville (Ronald Peet) at his soon-to-be demolished fishing shack on the island of Andros. We meet Neville and his (bad) monkey, Driggs, on the day that they find out Neville’s half-sister has sold the place out from under him in order for a developer named Christopher to make room for a glamorous resort. Neville is desperate to keep his slice of paradise, so he tries to think of anything to prevent it from being torn down. Unfortunately, Neville is not one for thinking outside the box, so the only lightbulb he has involves pissing in the construction crew’s gas tank.
Later, he goes drinking with his friends, and one of them tells him he should consult the Dragon Queen, purveyor of old-school Obeah, traditional curses, and spell-casting. At first, Neville is reluctant — his mom didn’t believe in Obeah — but when he finally pays the queen a call, he’s fully enchanted by her spell. Me too, Neville. Me too.
Jodie Turner-Smith is a sight to behold as the Dragon Queen. Her energy is fierce, and she owns the room, confidently controlling every iota of what her guests do and see while they are in her space. She even seems to have sway over her Ya-Ya (the wonderful L. Scott Caldwell), as she banishes her from the room as soon as Neville appears. As his friend instructed, Neville gives the queen some money, a bottle of booze as an offering, and an article of the developer Christopher’s clothing. The Dragon Queen circles him, giving us enough time to truly appreciate her killer red eyeliner, flirts with him, and then shoos him away like a fly without even telling him what she might attempt to do to solve his problem. Her power is awe-inspiring, and I worship her already.
That night, Neville sees the developer return from the States. It’s a guy in an orange poncho, the same man that Yancy sees murder one of the only witnesses from when the arm was pulled from the sea and onto a tourist fishing boat. That a man would wear an orange poncho to commit a drive-by murder is absolutely looney tunes, but it helps us identify him in the final few moments of the episode. The narrator promises that he’s been telling us the same story all along, a promise that feels a bit less dramatic than the show wants it to be because it’s unclear why we should care about this developer guy at all. But with this delightful murder-mystery-dinner feel of the cast of characters and the plentiful laughs, this show can take me anywhere as long as it continues to vibe this hard.
Monkeying Around
• Did anyone else feel like the show was kind of giving Dexter a nod when Yancy told Rosa that he wanted to bring the arm to Miami, “… where random severed arms are an everyday thing.†Dexter was responsible for oh-so-many severed body parts floating off of the Miami coast. Perhaps he killed this dude, too? Ah, the crossover potential!
• Yancy has to explain the red lights to two Key West residents during this episode, but I can confirm that you only have to be in the Keys for like 17 minutes before someone tells you about the turtles (and Ernest Hemingway and his damn cats). Living in the Keys, both Evan and Madeline would have certainly known what the lights were for, so these interludes were definitely for viewer benefit. Will we get to see some little turtle babies hatch at a pivotal point in the narrative? I sure hope so!
• Even with all of Yancy’s fast-talking and quip-making, the biggest laugh I got from this episode was the sight gag of his bike tipping slowly over into the water from the dock.
• Tom Petty Cover Watch: If you were listening closely, you might have noticed that this episode was exclusively soundtracked to the dulcet sounds of Tom Petty’s songs. The series kicks off with Petty’s “American Girl,†but then we get two covers — “Room at the Top†by Eddie Vedder and “Even the Losers†by Fitz and the Tantrums.