Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat – there is no bad monkey in this 10-part Apple TV+ series. There is a monkey, yes (who goes by the name of Driggs), but he’s especially bad. He’s just a little monkey who pops up from time to time. In the Bahamas.
If all this seems vaguely strange and a little bit quirky and a bit knockabout in its humour, then please let this description of a monkey called Driggs be a wider description for Bad Monkey. In this age of very serious, brooding crime dramas, it’s nice to have something that’s sunny, bright and bags of fun (with some really good jokes along the way).
It stars Hollywood star Vince Vaughan as suspended detective, Andrew Yancy, and there’s real pedigree behind the camera – it’s an adaptation of the beloved Carl Hiassan’s novel of the same name, and is adapted by award-winning showrunner Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso and Shrinking).
Yancey is an old-school detective and by that I mean somewhere along the lines of Jim Rockford from The Rockford Files – he’s smart-talking, flirtatious and definitely annoying at some points but has a rogueish charm that is hard to resist. After being banished from Miami, he even got suspended from his new job in the Florida Keys – an area that has its own special mystique and atmosphere – and is now a restaurant inspector.
The fun really begins when a severed arm is discovered on a fishing boat off the coast of Florida. Yancy is tasked with delivering the arm to the Miami morgue – which is a more complicated endeavour than it should be – where he meets pathologist Dr Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez). It doesn’t take long for Yancy to flirt outrageously with Rosa and two, throughout the series enjoy some will-they-won’t-they jousting.
But back to the arm. Whose arm is it? Where did it come from? And why was it on that boat?
The arm is, of course, only the start of the mystery. Already there’s an element of farce to this, a touch of the Coen brothers here and there, and as I mentioned those private detective shows from the 1980s where the central characters just can’t help but get themselves into trouble. And Yancy’s mouth gets him into trouble all the time.
He witnesses the shooting of the first mate of the boat where the arm was found, which leads him down into deeper trouble. Elsewhere, on Andros island in the Bahamas, a young man (Ronald Peet) Neville Stafford wants to put a curse on developers seeking to replace his home with a resort. Suddenly it goes a little bit Death In Paradise, with a whole new group of quirky characters (including Jodie Turner-Smith’s local spell-caster). With Yancy’s rather shaggy dog story occurring on the mainland – complete with narration from a grizzled Keys fisherman a la Big Lebowski – I’m not sure whether these two elements fit together.
But it is fun, a lot of fun.
The fun is heightened when we learn that the supposed owner of the arm – and the presumed dead – is Nick Stripling (Rob Delaney), who actually faked his own death so he and his sociopathic wife Eve (Meredith Hagner) could escape an insurance scam they were staging went wrong. They’re planning to settle in the Bahamas, which is where Neville – and his pet monkey, Driggs – come into it.
Yancy – and Rosa – get into all kinds of scrapes. And scrapes is really the name of the game here. Bad Monkey is full of fast-talking jokes, twists and turns and pacey action. But it’s 10 episodes long, which is quite a commitment and at the end of the day it doesn’t really engage you emotionally. It feels scant somehow and light and inconsequential. That’s entirely fair enough – and let’s face it, crime drama is a broad church – so if you are looking for something breezier and akin to some of the great shows of 80s like Magnum and The Rockford Files, then this is for you.
Paul Hirons
