‘Bad Monkey’ Is A Good Hang With Your Chill Old Pal, Vince Vaughn

The hero wanders through his scenes, casually purposeful. His shirts fit like they were tailored for him, even though nothing about his particular kind of attractiveness suggests that he’s fussed over it. He keeps up a steady, teasing patter; the characters who aren’t his friends reveal themselves in their inability to keep up with him. When he finds himself in mortal danger, he quickly shakes it off. When a sexy lady crosses his path, he flirts exactly enough to intrigue her. What makes him cool, above all, is that we can tell coolness isn’t something he’s ever bothered to think about: his every move seems effortless. But if leading a show like Bad Monkey really were as easy as Vince Vaughn makes it look, everyone would do it.

Bad Monkey — which Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence adapted from Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 novel, and which premieres its first two episodes on AppleTV+ tomorrow — stars Vaughn as Andrew Yancy. As we meet him, Yancy’s been suspended from his job as a detective in the Florida Keys as a consequence of bad choices he made in his relationship with Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan), deemed controversial by some in the community — her husband, for example. Yancy’s relaxing at home when his old partner Rogelio (John Ortiz) stops by: a visitor out on a fishing charter has caught a severed arm. 

Since local sheriff Sonny (Todd Allen Durkin) can’t imagine it could be a Keys case and doesn’t want word getting out that will depress tourism, he and Rogelio want Yancy to make it Miami’s problem. If he can, Yancy might just get his job back. But the story surrounding the arm only gets more complicated the more Yancy looks into it, pulling Miami coroner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez) into the case along with him. Eventually, the investigation encompasses medical fraud, folk magic, restaurant health inspection, megachurch culture, multiple international jurisdictions and the titular simian. 

Lots of TV shows feel like movie-sized ideas stretched out to fit the current vogue for prestige series; the intricacies of Bad Monkey’s plot make its 10-episode season feel earned.

A show that (a) revolves around a disembodied arm of mysterious provenance and (b) takes place in Florida could, in hackier hands, have turned into a collection of “Florida Man” clichés. There are certainly plenty about people losing arms to boating accidents or animal attacks; there’s even one about a monkey, although in that instance it was the owner who was bad, while the monkey was entirely blameless. Anyway, Bad Monkey’s Florida is full of grifters, goons and freaks — it’s still a crime story — but their criminal impulses are individual, not environmental. And the state’s natural beauty is lovingly filmed, the turquoise ocean breathtaking each time we see it outside Yancy’s beach bungalow. The local marine, avian and terrestrial wildlife is all treated reverentially too. If you don’t already know why Floridians should use red bulbs in their exterior light fixtures, you will before the series premiere is over. (Working with Floridian Kevin Biegel on the Sarasota-set Cougar Town may have shaped Lawrence’s view of the state.)

For a story like this, with plots intersecting serendipitously — including across international borders — the right casting is essential. We have to believe these kooks could find themselves in each other’s lives; once their characters are established, we want to see how they bounce off each other. While Vaughn is very much the show’s marquee star, producers have surrounded him with scene partners whose performance styles help reveal Yancy. 

Opposite Keith Fitzpatrick (Tom Nowicki), the captain on the charter trip when the arm was discovered and also the show’s narrator, Yancy knows he can be as curious as he needs to be. With Sonny, Yancy just talks fast enough not to let Sonny (someone narrator Keith calls a “bubba,” who blundered into his election as sheriff by not being as crooked as his opponents) follow his train of thought. Yancy pretends to be annoyed by his father Jim (Scott Glenn) and his animist beliefs, but secretly seems to share them. With Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner), widow to the arm’s former owner, Yancy’s quietly watchful, sizing her up immediately as a practiced liar. He takes on a very paternal kind of fond frustration with the story’s young women — Madeline (Nina Grollman), a sort of perp-in-law; and Eve’s stepdaughter Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence, Bill’s daughter). 

Much like Vivian Olyphant, who starred opposite her father Timothy in Justified: City Primeval last summer, Charlotte Lawrence’s performance is largely confined to glaring, whining and pouting, but considering her connection to the showrunner, she acquits herself respectably enough, even if I spent all her scenes wishing I could grab her by the shoulders and make her stand up straight. 

But all this gold in the supporting cast would be for naught if Vaughn wasn’t so magnetic as Bad Monkey’s protagonist. Though he was once a cop, and hopes to return to it as soon as he can, Yancy’s investigation technically isn’t police work, so it’s a lot easier to like him when his actions are much more in the PI realm, and thus bring to mind other chill private eyes pop culture has introduced us to, like Elliott Could in The Long Goodbye or James Garner in The Rockford Files. It should be noted that Yancy’s on the arm case as an unpaid freelancer, and that his actual job is inspecting the cleanliness of local restaurants. Yancy’s ongoing animosity toward Brian Thomas Smith’s Brennan, owner and chef at a particularly objectionable crab shack, brings us some of the show’s best jokes, as when Yancy says one rat got on his hind legs and looked him in the eye. Brennan knows the one Yancy’s describing and says it’s not even their leader. 

I’ve watched Vaughn for close to 30 years, in roles that are very close to his personality (like Swingers and Made), in talk show appearances and even in a talk-show guest-hosting gig at The Late Show when David Letterman was away having heart surgery — and by the way, if you have that episode, it’s your moral obligation to put it back on YouTube. Either Vaughn is hilariously improvising virtually all his comic dialogue in Bad Monkey, or its writers have an uncanny ability to write in his voice. Whatever the case, Vaughn is such a pleasure to watch in this role. Between Yancy and Vaughn’s recurring role as Freddy Funkhouser in the final (or is it?) season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2024 has been rich with reminders of what we all first learned in the mid-‘90s: Vince Vaughn is charming as hell.

Bad Monkey makes a few bad choices that, for all I know, were ported over from the book I haven’t read. For instance, there’s a runner that Yancy never gets Rosa’s surname right even though it’s pronounced exactly as it’s spelled. When the action moves to Andros, in the Bahamas, and we meet both the bad monkey, Driggs (Crystal the capuchin monkey — yes, the one from Friends) and his owner, Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), there’s some business with the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), a local priestess. I don’t know enough about those practices to know whether the portrayal is offensive, but styling her with a gold tooth is… definitely a choice. I also can’t believe this incorporated so many Tom Petty covers when repurposing Tom Petty songs as episode titles was already a motif for all of Cougar Town. But Bad Monkey is mostly just a good time — a shaggy comic mystery that goes down as smooth as a rum cocktail by the beach. 

Drink it down and hope we won’t have to wait too long for another round.