Apple TV’s “Bad Monkey” ticks off so many personal boxes that there was no way I’d be missing this new series.
It’s a sordid and silly Florida tale, and I put in my 25 years in the Banana Republic, so I’d get the jokes and geography.
It’s based on a novel by Carl Hiaassen, the the wry, sardonic journalist who documented “Florida Man,” Florida politics and Florida kitsch in newspapers before finding it all too dark and Florida weird for mere “facts” to limit his amused dismay.
Bill Lawrence, who gave us “Scrubs,” created the series. Loved “Scrubs.”
It brings Vince Vaughn out of self-destructive career limbo and back into the bantering motor-mouth that was his trademark back when “Swingers” and “Wedding Crashers” made him famous.
Hell, it even features my favorite Florida actor, Tom Nowicki in a role he seems tailor made for — a salty old charter boat cap’n who’s seen it all, and told “the fishin’ stories” that started many a Sunshine State misadventure.
Nowicki narrates “Bad Monkey,” a story of con artists, real estate predators, drugs, murder, corruption, code-busting restaurants and Bahama voodoo that has the feel of Hiaassen pulling out all the stops — every last one of them. But that narration, dryly delivered and insipidly incessant, becomes this series’ Achilles heel.
It begins in that charter boat where an arm dangling off the hook is the catch of the day. The “suspended” Key West sheriff’s department detective Andrew Yancy (Vaughn) is who his former partner (John Ortiz) palms this “evidence” onto.
All Yancy has to do is “not screw up,” not ask a lot of questions, maybe feed the arm to the gators, and he’ll get his old job back. Not the Caruso-profile one in Miami, where he used to work before irking the higher-ups, but the one that lets him pay for his Florida Strait view bungalow, whose view and tranquility are being ruined by the guache developer/realtor (Alex Moffat, “bro” funny) who doesn’t care about the special lights required to protect nesting “baby sea turtles” or the flora that gives the tiny Key Deer something to eat.
Yancy does. Yancy cares. And that’s usually his undoing.
That arm belonged to a guy lost in a boating accident, or so his bad-actress widow (Meredith Hagner) would have Yancy believe. Her drug-addict-turned-mega-church addict stepdaughter (Charlotte Lawrence) doesn’t buy it.
As the widow Eve has seemingly taken up with a Bahamas developer (Rob Delaney), maybe the daughter is right. Yancy, suspended for ramming the golf cart of his lover’s (Michelle Monaghan) husband and dunking him in the gin-clear marina basin, starts asking questions.
“All routine,” he reassures Eve Stripling, who cannot help but notice — like everyone else — that Yancy talks a lot. And that she talks a lot.
“You’re not writing any of this down.”
“I’ll remember.”
“You’d make a really great waiter!”
As the motor-mouth detective already tried to dump the arm with a cute but standoffish Miami coroner (Natalie Martinez), he soon talks himself into a partner in this “investigation,” one a demotion to restaurant inspector doesn’t interrupt. Yancy can’t stop talking and can’t stop asking questions.
“Really? No banter? I thought we were going to banter.“
The banter doesn’t let up when people start dying, and a black Chevy Yukon’s driver starts stalking and trying to shut Yancy up.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Gulf Stream, Bahamian small businessman Neville (Ronald Peet) finds himself and his pet monkey brusquely kicked out of his home, his business and his piece of paradise. He doesn’t pointlessly complain to the authorities. No, he pays the beguiling Dragon Queen witch doctor (Jodie Turner-Smith, sexy and sinister) to see that harm comes to the rapacious developer. When nothing happens quickly enough, he learns he has to pay more. And more.
The excellent cast and big and small twists recommend “Bad Monkey.” The Florida flavor of it all is underscored with steel drums, Jimmy Buffett tunes and Tom Petty covers and lots of pastels — especially teal.
It is great seeing and hearing Vaughn this engaged in a character with integrity and big, whopping moral failings that don’t keep him from upholding the law, even when it comes to dirty Key West eateries.
“This place is like a day spa for rats!”
But here’s a big hangup, one that burdens the opening episodes and relents only slightly in later ones, as Hiassen & Co. run out of twists.
It’s not just Vaughn who talks this damned thing to death. There is endless voice-over narration, stating the head-slappingly obvious, redundantly-added to visuals which have told us what’s happened, what is about to happen and over-explaining a character’s state of mind.
That’s what you hired Vaughn, Peet, Monaghan, Scott Glenn and many others et al to get across.
“It should be pretty clear right now, Yancy was not good at letting things go.”
Yeah, we see that.
“Yancy got that warm glow he always got when he’d made an enemy for life.”
Oh, we got it.
“It was time for Neville to head home…”
Nowicki gives every line a folksy Florida film noir growl, and if this voice-over touch had been limited to lines like “Miami may, in fact, be the ‘dancing on boats’ capital,” it wouldn’t have intruded and slowed the narrative to a crawl. I can’t believe the producers didn’t step back, watch the finished product, and whack three quarters of this turgid, repetititive restating-the-obvious before broadcast.
But Bill Lawrence’s half-hour sitcom “Scrubs” added an extra dose of “wry” in voice-over (Zach Braff plays a drug-addict doctor here). When it doesn’t work in a sitcom, it skips by. When it doesn’t work here, which is most of the time, it’s a tone-deaf rim shot by a drummer who misses the rim.
Hiaassen, an old hand at having his work adapted by Hollywood (“Hoot,””Striptease,””Skinny Dip”), took an executive producer credit here. Writers tend to love that author’s voice narration in films of their work, often to the film’s detriment. With Lawrence’s history with this lazy crutch and Hiaassen accepting the flattery of adding that “writerly” touch, “Bad Monkey” is damned near undone by this indulgence.
Vince at his best, with stoic Ortiz, Peet drolly Bahamian, femme fatalish Monaghan, dizzy Hagner and dead sexy Martinez (of TV’s “The Fugitive” and “Ordinary Joe”), there’s plenty to relish here.
But considering how keen I was to see it and wallow in sketchy Florida Men and Women and “types” behaving Floridian, the show becomes progressively more deflating as it reveals its tricks and pounds them home in case we missed them.
The lazy over-narration turns this into “Hiaassen for Dummies.” I’ve watched half of it, and for all the casting coups, local color and amusing banter, I can’t say I’ll finish it.
Rating: TV-MA, grisly violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity and profanity
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Ronald Peet, Meredith Hagner, Michelle Monaghan, Natalie Martinez, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rob Delaney, Zach Braff, Scott Glenn, Alex Moffat, Tom Nowicki and John Ortiz.
Credits: Created by Bill Lawrence, based on the Carl Hiassen novel. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: Nine episodes, @:40-58 minutes each
