'Bad Monkey' Drowns in 'Ted Lasso' Quirk: Review

Bill Lawrence has a type. In his Apple TV+ era, the Ted Lasso creator, who became a brand name in the aughts with his surreal medical comedy Scrubs, has favored a particular kind of protagonist. A single, middle-aged guy (whose whiteness and straightness almost go without saying) with decades’ worth of baggage, usually of the romantic variety, this character uses a quippy persona to hide his fundamental sadness. He cracks jokes, does impressions, self-deprecates, dispenses cultural references, and generally behaves like he’s hosting a talk show, even when he’s having what is supposed to be an intimate conversation. 

This is not a type of person I have ever observed in nature. But in Lawrenceland, he’s Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso transforming an underdog football club into a family of winners while estranged from his own wife, son, and emotions. He’s Shrinking antihero Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel), a therapist and father whose nervous breakdown following the death of his wife might just lead to a personal and professional breakthrough. And now he’s Andrew Yancy, the wise-cracking, down-on-his-luck suspended police detective, played by Vince Vaughn, at the center of Lawrence and Matt Tarses’ Bad Monkey, premiering Aug. 14 on Apple TV+. An adaptation of the 2013 novel by Carl Hiaasen, the darkly comedic, extremely Floridian crime drama constitutes a rare departure, for Lawrence, from the sitcom format. Unfortunately, the series is just as infatuated with its over-the-top protagonist—and as exhausting in its relentless quirk—as his recent comedies.

The best decision Lawrence and Tarses made in bringing Hiaasen’s book to the small screen was to cast Vaughn, an experienced wise-cracker who fits so comfortably into the lead role that his performance might nearly convince you the character resembles an actual human being. If you’re going to write dialogue like Yancy’s postcoital riff, “That was a fun way to celebrate. I mean, I guess we could’ve gone out for ice cream, but I preferred this,” Vaughn should be the one to say it. (Standout supporting performances by Jodie Turner-Smith, Rob Delaney, and Michelle Monaghan also go a long way toward mitigating the script’s silliness.)

A former Miami cop who was exiled to the Florida Keys, then suspended following a public attack on his ex-girlfriend Bonnie’s (Monaghan) husband, Yancy has nothing to do besides antagonize the douchey real estate developer (Alex Moffat) building a monstrous yellow mansion next door to his beachside home. Then his old partner Ro (John Ortiz) drives up with a severed arm—middle finger extended, naturally—that was just fished out of the water. Signs point to a shark attack, but Yancy smells something, well, fishy. Despite needing to lay low in hopes of resolving his legal woes and getting his job back, he gets sucked into the mystery. As the people around him keep saying, he is the kind of person who struggles to let things go.

Meanwhile, a couple hundred miles away in the Bahamas, another story involving an entitled real estate developer is unfolding on the island of Andros. Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), a young fisherman who has been enjoying a life of simple pleasures—beers with friends, happy-go-lucky promiscuity, the companionship of the show’s eponymous pet monkey—discovers that his half-sister has sold his beach shack to an outsider who’s buying up land for a luxury resort. Desperate to keep his home, Neville turns to Gracie (Turner-Smith), a fearsome practitioner of witchcraft known as the Dragon Queen. Of course, as Bad Monkey’s folksy charter-captain narrator (Tom Nowicki) explains, unnecessarily for anyone who has ever watched an ensemble drama before: “I wuddn’t tellin’ two stories. I was tellin’ one.”

But Yancy’s storyline doesn’t converge with Neville’s as elegantly as one might hope. The Black Bahamians who live on Andros are a bit exoticized as well as a bit ancillary to a plot that ultimately hinges on Yancy, his medical-examiner love interest Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), and the show’s villains. (Turner-Smith deserves a lot of credit for making an incongruous, vaguely mystical character feel emotionally conflicted in a way that renders her more believable than many of Bad Monkey's less fanciful personalities.) Lawrence has a tendency to underwrite characters who aren’t his charming, flailing protagonists. Ted Lasso has a gay character whose whole arc is about being gay; a Nigerian character whose whole arc is about his relationship to Nigeria; mature female characters who spend most of their screen time waiting for the middle-aged boys they inexplicably love to grow up (see also: Jessica Williams’ Gaby, in Shrinking, and Rosa here).

In fairness to Lawrence and Tarses, Bad Monkey inherited some of its problems from Hiaasen, and others are common to TV’s ongoing literary-adaptation epidemic. Two twisted characters, Bonnie and Eve (Meredith Hagner, playing a broader version of her hilariously deranged Search Party character, Portia), who weaponize sex and dependency in ways that can only be read as misogynistic, come straight out of the book. The narrator is a crutch, leaned on too often and prone to dropping clichés whose laziness isn’t mitigated by the writers’ displays of self-awareness: “You can only push a man so far before he decides to fight back.” “Trouble always seemed to come looking for him.” A soundtrack of Tom Petty covers—21 of them—might have been more apt for a Southern stoner saga than for an island-set, rogue-cop caper. And the series is way too long, at 10 episodes, with a finale that sets up the inevitable second season. 

Excessive length is a common complaint about TV seasons on streaming services, which are incentivized to keep subscribers on their platforms for as long as possible. Often, this seems like a criticism of a plot that isn’t sufficiently eventful to sustain eight or 10 episodes. But in many cases, the bigger issue is a cast of characters that doesn’t keep us charmed, engaged, curious, or simply entertained enough to want to spend so many hours in their company. In Lawrence’s case, how much you enjoy his shows is, to a great extent, a matter of taste more than quality. Millions of Ted Lasso and Shrinking fans adore his messy, sad-clown talk-show hosts and the broad secondary characters who prop up their quests for midlife fulfillment. If you’re one of them, you’re likely to find Bad Monkey and its troupe of island-dwelling oddballs a breezy blast. 

Still, I’d argue that Lawrence’s obsession with personal growth, the way he seeds his series with shrinks and sages, is incompatible with this level of quirk. It’s too hard to wring genuine psychological insight out of characters that don’t talk or act like cohesive people. (I’m still shuddering over a scene where the otherwise lovely, empathetic Rosa steals a “super-cute top” from a corpse she’s autopsying and wears it out to drinks.) Yancy’s epiphany, when it finally arrives, feels as out of place as a water-logged human arm at the end of a fish hook. 

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