(courtesy IMP Awards)
Even though he’s about two centuries late for the rise of TV streaming, there’s no doubt that Scottish playwright, novelist and poet would have found a lot with which he could relate with the sunny beachside film noir storyline of Bad Monkey.
Based on the book of the same name by Carl Hiaasen and developed by Bill Lawrence, Bad Monkey is the (not) living, (not) breathing murder mystery embodiment of Scott’s immortal lines “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive”, a pithy encapsulation of how one poor decision, which on the surface seems fiendishly simple, can becoming ever more complex as more and more lies are perpetrated to keep the truth at bay.
You see, the truth is simple, by and large, but people are not alas, and so, rather than sticking with what we’ve got or just straight out spelling things out as they actually stand, we embroider and we embellish and we straight out deceive and then suddenly we’re so enmeshed in a web of lies that there’s no easy way out.
Or sometimes no way out at all.
It’s that central truth which resonates right through every skillfully wrought scene and exquisitely well delivered line in Bad Monkey which is full of some sage observations about the human psyche, all dressed in the glitz and glamour of South Florida and the Bahamas where ostensibly the most paradisiacal parts of civilisation are on show.
But behind all the sunshine and yachts and chill afternoons in waterside bars, which is PR central for the idea that the coast equals civilisational perfection distilled, lies a salient truth – it doesn’t matter where you drop a person, especially if they are balanced on the sociopathic or even just the little bit broken side of things, who they really are will eventually out and all those bad decisions and twisted parts of the soul will out.
Not so good for those of us caught in the firing line or even those of us seeking to bring some justice to this sunshine-washed fetid pool of lies like Detective Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) who, busted down by some very poor impulse control some years earlier, finds himself not only working in the policing backwater of the Florida Keys but suspended from the police force for reasons which Bad Monkey soon makes clear.
Saying what that is would be a spoiler too far, but suffice to say that Yancy, who is honest to a fault and full of wisecracking quips that fill the show with a fecund supply of very witty truthfulness, is very good at making enemies and doing the wrong thing often, in pursuit of some very lofty goals.
Yancy is, at heart, a really decent guy, which is a relief because what works for Bad Monkey is that in a sea of really bad people doing some quite obviously bad things, we have a trope-heavy policeman who deviates from the film noir in one important way – he has integrity, though poorly expressed, and wants to see the right thing done.
He is also very bad at letting things go and so after an arm is fished onto a charting fishing boat and it looks like a local businessman (Rob Delaney) has gone missing, presumed dead, in a boating accident, and no one at the police station Yancy is assigned to and currently suspended from, cares about whether it could be a murder, the down-on-his-luck policeman is compelled to investigate anyway.
In short course, he meets the dead man’s widow, Eve (Meredith Hagner) who, you suspect is not quite as grief stricken as she first appears, gets to know the Rosa Campesino in Miami, Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez) and continues to annoys the hell out of his newly-out friend and ex-partner, Rogelio (John Ortiz) who, against his better judgement, goes along with just about all of Yancy’s hunches and ideas which turn out to be right on the money but messy and complicated all the same.
Yancy is, it turns out, bang on what actually happened to Eve’s dead husband Christopher, and as the body count mounts and it becomes clear that if a boating accident did in fact kill Eve’s dead husband Christopher that an awful lot of people are dying to cover it all up.
So, that’s the mystery and as a slowly unveiled trail of clues and not red herrings litter the golden sands of the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, where a seemingly unconnected story about a man called Neville (Ronald Peet) and his beach shack and his magical fight to save his way of life is languidly unfurling, it becomes clear in these four episodes that Bad Monkey is a brilliant piece of murder mystery storytelling.
But what also marks this as something rather special is how funny the show is.
Riffing off Vaughn’s love of improv, Bad Monkey excels at sparklingly funny and clever dialogue, fully-realisied characterisation which gives each the supporting characters a good shot at keeping the ebguiling narrative humming along, and a whimsical look at how f**ked up people can make their lives, even when they are supposedly trying to better them.
It’s a morality tale in Hawaiian shirts and wind-wafted bars, and it absolutely zings off the screen, veering from dark moments of the soul to murder to quipping which is, on the surface, very funny, but which points out again and again that try though we might to get away with murder and lies that all the deceiving gets pretty entangling after a while.
Or, you know, almost immediately.
Bad Monkey is an absolute joy to watch because while it is a morality play writ large, and it doesn’t pretend humanity has a handle of what a good life looks like, it also has a lot of fun with all that darkness and fallenness, leaving you laughing even as you wince at just how bad we can make things when we are supposedly trying to make them so much better.
Bad Monkey streams on AppleTV+