Bad Monkey is an Apple+ series that I actually watched way sooner than I ever would have thought.
Perhaps the lure of something a little more light with Vince Vaughn was the draw, but this show wasn’t short, nor was it all light. Again, I think I am slipping in my research on things, because I had no clue this series was based on a book until after I watched the first episode. The tone of this show, while the internet tells me it’s a black comedy, really was just so strange to me. That, coupled with the vibrancy of the location and the goofy narration, had me doubting my choice to start this show at first. But once I learned it was based on a novel, the narration bothered me a little less, and I wonder if that character will play a more involved role in the second season this series already got promised.
The show centers on former detective Andrew Yancy, who’s currently on a bit of a sabbatical in the Florida Keys after rear-ending a man who’s wife he was having an affair with into the ocean. Don’t worry, that guy is fine, but he was a rich doctor, so it should come as no surprise that Yancy got his hands slapped. He seems to be doing an okay job of resting and relaxing until his partner brings over an arm that needs delivered to the Miami morgue. From there, Yancy gets himself entangled in a really gnarly and deadly web.
The arm belonged to Nick Stripling, whose younger wife, Eve, doesn’t seem to be grieving in a way a normal person would. This leads Yancy to suspect that she killed him. He manages to rope in the Miami medical examiner, Rosa, into his shenanigans, but more people wind up dead in mysterious circumstances related to the Striplings. If you thought one tropical location wasn’t enough, down in the Bahamas, there is a man named Neville who is seeking the help of the Dragon Queen to curse a couple who is buying up a bunch of property to build a resort. He just wants to fish off the land his parents left him! It takes a while before Yancy and Neville’s paths cross, but we as an audience get to see what’s happening on either side of the coin and how their goals are maybe more shared than they know.
This ten-episode series is a meticulous one, with only one unnecessary character (sorry Michelle Monaghan), but otherwise this was a really entertaining watch. Thinking about everything now though, it’s still hard for me to reconcile Vaughn’s involvement in this particular style of storytelling. Of course he’s wonderful at comedy, and he’s done his fair share of dramas, but he just felt a little out of place. And I still think that has more to do with how the series was shot. In fact, most of the dialogue that he delivered felt like it was written specifically for him – I laughed out loud a lot at his quips! Overall, I enjoyed the show, but maybe not enough to check out the novel. I’ll be awaiting the second season, which hopefully we’ll get sooner rather than later.