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This review was made possible by advance screeners of Bad Monkey. Bad Monkey premieres on Apple TV+ on Wednesday, August 14th with two episodes. New episodes will air every Wednesday.
There is an important piece of information we need to go over before diving into Bad Monkey. This series comes from Bill Lawrence, the creator of shows such as Ted Lasso and Shrinking. Now Bad Monkey is very much NOT in the same vein as the two aforementioned series. A piece of information that is needed to temper expectations as well as putting yourself in the right frame of mind for this series.
This new Apple TV+ series is based off Carl Hiaasen’s New York Times Bestselling novel of the same name. Bad Monkey follows Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) a former Miami detective who has been relegated to health inspector duty in the Keys. After a mysterious severed human arm falls into his lap, he’s determined the solve the case behind it to get his old job back.
The thing about this arm is, Yancy was only supposed to deliver it to a morgue. He was never assigned this case, hell, the case itself was considered an accident. But he’s determined to get to the bottom of the real story at hand, by any means necessary. The arm belonged to the husband of the now widowed Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner). After flashing her rather expensive taste, Yancy suspects she might of murdered him for the life insurance and made the whole thing look like an accident.
That fateful trip to the morgue reeled in Yancy’s new partner in crime in this journey of redemption, Rosa (Natalie Martinez). As they track Eve to the Bahama’s the story begins to intertwine with the lives of island locals, Neville (Ronald Peet) and the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith). This gives the series a real look at how people who live in these resort locations struggle to survive, while the tourists come and leech off their land for pleasure. That struggle can lead to acts of desperation and sometimes sacrifice of the things you hold dear.
Yancy and Rosa’s chemistry is off the charts, it’s the heart of this series. Vaughn does play a similar role from what we are used to (the man is beyond charming), but seeing him get his hands dirty and involved in a show with a good amount of blood was pretty refreshing. For a series called Bad Monkey I gotta say I was expecting the monkey to play a bigger factor in the story itself. He’s definitely present visually, but not really in the narrative other than a few moments here and there.
Another pleasant surprise in the series is Rob Delaney as Christopher. After his beyond lovable return as Peter in Deadpool & Wolverine a few weeks ago, seeing Delaney portray an absolute scumbag was an utter joy. Surprisingly that’s not all we get to the character either, as a weight of guilt builds as the series progresses, making him much more than meets the eye.
I will say in the beginning the series can be a little overwhelming. There’s a lot of stories going on at once that all eventually do intersect, yet at first feel like three very different stories happening simultaneously. But this off-the-books murder mystery takes a lot of unexpected turns full of lies, murder, ex-lovers and even some occasional parental judgement. In the end it feels like a journey of self discovery and learning to let go. It leaves you with a message that I think is very important, do what you love. Don’t settle for the status quo, shoot for true happiness.
Bad Monkey weaves an intricate web that shouldn’t work but it does. The series takes so many diverging storylines and perfectly lets them grow on their own leading to a brilliant collision that makes for some extremely captivating television. While watching you may think, “Where is all of this going?”, but stay tuned and trust the process. The result is more than worth it. This is definitely not the type of series I expected, but sometimes getting what you didn’t think you wanted results in some of the best viewing experiences.
