During the month of August, summer transitions into a limbo phase between this season and the next. It’s technically still a time for long naps in hammocks and vacations to the shore. But a tinge of dread hangs in the air along with the humidity, a portent of serious things — school, work, responsibilities — starting to swirl in the distance, just off the coast.
Bad Monkey, Apple TV+’s latest series developed by Bill Lawrence (Ted Lasso, Shrinking) and adapted from the wry mystery novel by Carl Hiaasen, exists squarely in that mid-August period. This smartly written, slightly pulpy story unfolds against the backdrop of three tropical settings — Key West, Miami, and Andros, a small island in the Bahamas — that place the viewer in a beachy, relaxing mind-set. But those tiny pockets of paradise are constantly threatened by darker forces: overzealous real-estate developers, corrupt cops, and sometimes even an angry Mother Nature herself. The vibes in Bad Monkey manage to be tense and chill at the same time, like a warning spoken but drowned out by the sound of Jimmy Buffett. Its characters are in various states of limbo, too, each of them striving to find and hold onto happiness, as well as the premium views of crystalline waters that sometimes come with it, for as long as they can.
That includes Andrew Yancy, an extremely tall and flippant former Miami detective who was reassigned to work for the sheriff’s department in the Keys until he got temporarily suspended from that job, too. Despite that disciplinary action, the sheriff gives him an assignment in the first episode: pick up a severed human arm recently fished out of the ocean and deliver it to the coroner’s office in Miami so it can become that city’s problem instead. Unfortunately, Yancy is not the type of guy who can simply drop off a random limb and move on with his life. He starts investigating why that arm really showed up, then digs himself into deeper and deeper trouble with the blasé insouciance of a charmer accustomed to smooth-talking his way out of any situation. He’s a character strongly reminiscent of Vince Vaughn, which works out perfectly since Vince Vaughn is the actor who plays him.
Yancy is a close cousin of Trent Walker, the L.A. hipster Vaughn played in Swingers; Beanie Campbell, the ear-muffing father in Old School; and Jeremy Grey, the guy who snuck into various nuptial events in Wedding Crashers. Like them, he’s a motormouth with an open heart and a master’s degree in sarcasm. When his father, a wonderfully grizzled Scott Glenn, notes that his son’s new girlfriend seems unbothered by Yancy’s worst qualities, Yancy immediately pushes back. “I don’t know that I have any worst qualities,†he deadpans. “Maybe caring too much or being too much fun to spend time with?†This is the Vince Vaughn–iest role the Dodgeball star has played in at least a decade, and it’s immensely satisfying to watch him joyfully reclaim his rascally side.
But Yancy isn’t all wisecracks and witty banter. Despite the sunny façade, there’s a slightly overcast sky hanging over his lonely life, and that’s true of most of Bad Monkey’s characters. That quality marks the series as somewhat of a departure for Lawrence, a showrunner and creator with an established affinity for the sentimental and a desire to find the good in all of his characters (especially ones who have been hired to coach football in the U.K. without understanding the sport). Happily and appropriately, he and his writers, including co-creator Matt Tarses and Ashley Nicole Black, resist those tendencies here because they do not suit the material. The people who populate Bad Monkey are complicated and flawed and, in some cases, wholly irredeemable; if you put up a “Believe†sign anywhere in this show, someone would immediately stick a chewed wad of gum on it. At its core, Bad Monkey is impatient with bullshit. Not the kind that Yancy tosses casually into the air from his perch on a barstool, but the dishonest, hypocritical, and cruel kind of bullshit that makes the world a worse place.
A distrust of anyone who doesn’t show reverence for the natural world gurgles just beneath the surface of all that transpires in this series, and that’s especially true on Andros, where a young man named Neville (Ronald Peet) is struggling to hold onto the waterfront land he inherited from his father, even though there’s a strong chance it will be stolen from him by the builders of a fancy new resort. A healer and mystic known as the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith, at turns enigmatic and sinister) also wrestles with aligning herself with the shady resort owners and the legitimacy of her spiritual connection to the island.
It’s unclear at first how all the business on Andros links back to Yancy and his various compatriots in Florida, including his lover Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan, really sinking her teeth into the part of Uninhibited Wildcard); his cynical best friend and fellow cop Rogelio (John Ortiz, dryly volleying back every zinger Vaughn sends sailing his way); and Rosa (a warmly sexy Natalie Martinez), the uninspired Miami morgue worker who gets entangled with Yancy on multiple fronts. But the narrator who provides constant running commentary throughout the series assures us those connections will be explained in due time, and he makes good on his promise.
On any other series, such a heavy reliance on voice-over narration might seem pretentious or unnecessary. Indeed, there are times when that omniscient explainer, voiced by Tom Nowicki, who also plays a minor role as a fisherman, sounds like he’s trying to channel a version of Carrie Bradshaw who bangs out copy at Sloppy Joe’s Bar: “She couldn’t help but wonder if Andrew was off gallivanting with Rosa.†But other observations, like “This was the first time Yancy had ever seen a bad decision in an orange dress,†are almost poetic in their concision, and Nowicki delivers all of them with a gravelly bluntness that makes it sounds like he’s telling us this story between sips of Corona. Instead of grating, the narration grows on you.
If that orange-dress line didn’t already tip you off, Bad Monkey is, like its source material, a work of Florida noir, where our sunburned anti-heroes wear flip-flops and feast on conch fritters, and red lights designed to protect baby turtles from wandering into dangerous territory cast a neon glow over the sand. Given the number of covers of Tom Petty hits sprinkled across the soundtrack, though, it’s maybe more accurate to categorize Bad Monkey as a specific subgenre called Tom Petty noir. The music of Florida’s beloved rock-and-roll son is more reflective of the spirit of the show, which, like much of Petty’s music, is deeply anti-Establishment and critical of America’s status-obsessed culture but extremely unstressed about the whole thing. If anyone’s ever been a rebel without a clue, it’s Andrew Yancy. But he’s also somebody who wants the world to work the way it should, not the way it actually does. Like its protagonist, Bad Monkey is a show that believes in justice, and also in ordering another round while waiting for the arc of the universe to finally bend toward it.