Vince Vaughn in a scene in Bad Monkey, on Apple TV+.Bob Mahoney/Apple TV+
Bad Monkey, Apple TV+’s new Florida-set caper starring Vince Vaughn as a cheeky cop, is a pretty good time-passer of a television show, with one unfortunately bad element dragging it down – and it’s not the sneaky simian of the title.
Every time you find yourself getting into the groove of this 10-part crime comedy, an unnecessary narrator cuts in with banal interjections, clunky segues or funny asides that just fall flat.
This gruff voice-over – that of a fishing boat captain, played by Tom Nowicki and extraneous to the plot – is the monkey on the back of Bad Monkey, an adaptation of a Carl Hiaasen novel set, like many of the former Miami Herald journalist’s books, in the seedy underbelly of the Sunshine State.
The narration may be trying to capture that author’s cynical city-desk, seen-it-all voice – or maybe the writers were aiming for an opposite-coast The Big Lebowski vibe. Alas, he just comes off as know-it-all rather than omniscient – and, worst of all, keeps trying to dictate which characters you sympathize with in which scenes, rather than just letting you watch the Florida Keys chaos unfold and draw your own conclusion.
Now, I have nothing against narrators on TV shows, in general. The device has worked perfectly well in comedy-tinged dramas anchored by anti-heroes such as Dexter and You (for a while, anyway) – or on an off-beat P.I. show like Veronica Mars.
But there’s just no need for this one given the way Vaughan plays detective Andrew Yancy, a suspended police officer in the Florida Keys reassigned as a health inspector, who can’t help himself from investigating a severed arm fished out of the water by a tourist.
Ronald Peet in a scene in Bad Monkey.Bob Mahoney/Apple TV+
No laconic cop, he: Yancy’s a chatty Cathy constantly shooting off his own casual, self-consciously comic commentary on his life as he’s living it, whether people are shooting at him or not.
Indeed, Vaughan’s Yancy would be an ideal protagonist for a P.I. procedural, cycling around the Keys like Jessica Fletcher crossed with a giraffe.
Hooked into transporting the recovered arm between two Florida police jurisdictions, neither of which want to catch a case, Yancy ends up looking into it with a Miami coroner Rosa (Natalie Martinez) – with whom he immediately has some serious Moonlighting chemistry.
The appendage turns out to belong to a missing man whose actress wife, Eve – played by Meredith Hagner, who was similarly comically soulless in Search Party – doesn’t quite seem to be performing the part of the grieving widow properly; the missing man’s daughter, Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence), suspects she killed him for the insurance money.
Indeed, Eve’s quickly invested her easy-won cash in a resort on an island in the Bahamas run by a mysterious developer played by Rob Delaney, a perfect counterpart for Vaughan in both comic chops and height.
Cut to the Bahamas where – well, if only Bad Monkey just cut there. Instead, to give you a taste of the show’s overexplaining voice-over, our narrator sticks his oar in like so:
“Before I got any further here, I gotta tell you a little story about a young man over in the Bahamas,” he says. “Now, I know it’s annoying to leave this story just when it’s getting fun, but I promise it’ll make sense eventually.”
No, Mr. Narrator, no. It’s in no way annoying for a show to shift focus from one character to another.
What is annoying is overhyping the enjoyment a viewer is having one moment, then talking down to that viewer as if they’ve never seen a series with multiple storylines that eventually overlap.
But now I’m the one digressing. … In the islands, Bad Monkey follows the story of Neville (Ronald Peet), who has a very cute monkey companion, and who has had his ancestral land snatched up by Eve.
He pays for a curse from a local practitioner of Obeah named the Dragon Queen, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, who out-acts the whole rest of the cast – and the only character to whom you are likely to ever develop that much of an attachment.
Everything else is light and airy, filled out with sleazy real estate agents, romantic Russian mafiosos, philosophizing henchmen, and, in a head-scratcher of a subplot, True Detective’s Michelle Monaghan as a seductive sex offender.
Okay, so that’s another not-so-good element of Bad Monkey then. But there’s more than enough to make it the streaming equivalent of a guilty pleasure beach read – if only there were a way to turn off that commentary track by Captain Obvious.