Watching: Bad Monkey

2024, download

We are always on the look out for a "new crime show". I have been a fan of noir, but later in life I gained a great fondness for certain procedurals. Not everything. Its hard to define what attracts us to what crime show. We loved Longmire but have never got into Justified despite trying. We watch The Rookie but not Chicago: P.D. I am always on the look out for a new Luther but we have tried a number of times to watch Broadchurch and failed.

When this came along, I was curious. I am not a fan of Vince Vaughn, but also not bothered by him; he's just in that vein of comedy that generally never attracts me. I do currently have a thing for Florida, the Keys in particular. Not sure what it is, but it has replaced that desire to run away to a tropical island. 

What 100. Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn, Freaky) is disgraced Miami cop sent to do health inspection duty in the Florida Keys. He's a bit of a dick, but a lovable dick with a good heart, and he never lets anything go. When a severed arm shows up, Yancy can't let a good mystery go unsolved. It drags him into a somewhat low-key conspiracy involving con man Nick (Rob Delaney, Deadpool & Wolverine) and Eve (Meredith Hagner, Search Party), his sociopath wife, but travels around a lot with a bunch of supporting characters, including a Bahamian witch called "The Dragon Queen" (Jodie Turner-Smith, Nighflyers), the Miami coroner who Yancy falls for, and the socialite (Michelle Monaghan, Source Code) Yancy had an affair with.

And a bad monkey.

1 Great. Surprisingly, it was Yancy himself. As said, I am not a huge Vince Vaughn fan but what I do like is when humour is used to make the characters in the show laugh. Yancy is always cracking wise, but he never looks happier than when he makes coroner / new-GF Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez, The Fugitive) smile or chuckle. He's also just a good guy. Despite wavering towards fuck-up, he cares for people, even strangers.

1 Good. The locales. I love me some sitting in a comfortable chair looking out at the water, sipping on a tasty beer. When the series spins up, you have two characters, Yancy and Neville (Ronald Peet, Dicktown), both who have their Happy Places on the beach, one in Florida, one in the Bahamas. Neville wants nothing to do more than get back to that, while Yancy does yearn for more, as long as he can come back to his comfortable bungalow on the beach. The show contrasts this ideal against the "villains" who want big, expensive, gawdy and superfluous, and will stop at nothing to get it. Florida is usually the villain in fiction, but I have always had a fondness for warm sea air, even if I have never experienced it. I am from the Atlantic Coast far beyond any "warm sea air" but my desire for a place on the beach is always in the back of my head.

1 Bad. Any bad? That it ended, and that unlike ten years ago, with only a few exceptions, pretty much anything I enjoy only gets one season, and is then cancelled? This was a neo-noir (which is odd to say considering almost the entire show is in the bright sunlight) show about good people going up against bad people, and I am not sure the affability of Yancy fits today's climate. 

Alternative version of my own post is Kent's own, because we completely agreed.