“Bad Monkey” drowns in “Ted Lasso” peculiarity: criticism

Bill Lawrence has a type. In his Apple TV+ era, the Ted Lasso Creator who became a brand name in the noughties with his surreal medical comedy Scrubshas favored a certain type of protagonist. A middle-aged, single man (whose whiteness and heterosexuality are almost a given) with decades of baggage, mostly of a romantic nature, who hides his basic sadness by playing a quick-witted role. He cracks jokes, imitates others, ridicules himself, makes cultural references, and generally behaves as if he's hosting a talk show, even when conducting a supposedly intimate conversation.

I have never seen such a type of person in nature. But in Lawrenceland he is Jason Sudeikis' Ted Lasso, who turns an underdog football team into a winning family while being alienated from his own wife, son and feelings. He is shrinkage Antihero Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel), a therapist and father whose nervous breakdown after the death of his wife may give him a personal and professional breakthrough. And now he is Andrew Yancy, the quick-witted, down-on-his-luck and suspended police detective played by Vince Vaughn, at the center of Lawrence and Matt Tarses' Evil MonkeyPremiering August 14 on Apple TV+, the darkly funny, very Florida crime drama is an adaptation of Carl Hiaasen's 2013 novel and represents a rare departure from the sitcom format for Lawrence. Unfortunately, the series is just as infatuated with its over-the-top protagonists – and just as exhausting in its relentless oddity – as his recent comedies.

The best decision Lawrence and Tarses made in adapting Hiaasen's book to the screen was casting Vaughn, a seasoned joker who fits the lead role so well that his performance could almost convince you the character resembles a real person. When writing dialogue like Yancy's postcoital riff, “That was a fun way to celebrate. I mean, I guess we could have gone out for ice cream, but I preferred that,” Vaughn should be the one saying it. (Standout supporting performances from Jodie Turner-Smith, Rob Delaney and Michelle Monaghan also do a lot to soften the script's silliness.)

Yancy, a former Miami cop exiled to the Florida Keys and then suspended after publicly attacking the husband of his ex-girlfriend Bonnie (Monaghan), has nothing better to do than provoke the dimwitted real estate developer (Alex Moffat) who's building a monstrous yellow mansion next to his beachfront home. Then his old partner, Ro (John Ortiz), drives up with a severed arm — middle finger extended, of course — that's just been fished out of the water. Signs point to a shark attack, but Yancy suspects something, well, fishy. Although he has to keep a low profile to resolve his legal problems and get his job back, he gets drawn into the mystery. As those around him keep saying, he's the type of person who has trouble letting things go.

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away in the Bahamas, on the island of Andros, another story is unfolding involving an arrogant real estate developer. Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), a young fisherman who enjoys a life of simple pleasures – beers with friends, carefree promiscuity, the company of the show's eponymous monkey – discovers that his half-sister has sold his beach hut to a stranger who is buying up land for a luxury resort. Desperate to keep his home, Neville turns to Gracie (Turner-Smith), a fearsome witchcraft practitioner known as the Dragon Queen. Of course, since Evil MonkeyThe folksy narrator and charter captain (Tom Nowicki) explains – unnecessarily for anyone who has ever seen an ensemble drama: “I wouldn't tell two stories. I told one.”

But Yancy's storyline doesn't mesh with Neville's as elegantly as one might hope. The black Bahamians who live on Andros are somewhat exoticized and somewhat peripheral in a plot that ultimately hinges on Yancy, his lover, medical examiner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), and the show's villains. (Turner-Smith deserves a lot of credit for making an incongruous, slightly mystical character emotionally torn, which makes her more believable than many of the other characters.) Evil Monkey(Lawrence's less imaginative personalities tend to underestimate the achievement of characters who are not his charming, helpless protagonists.) Ted Lasso has a gay character whose entire storyline revolves around being gay; a Nigerian character whose entire storyline revolves around his relationship with 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 shrinkageand Rosa here).

To be fair to Lawrence and Tarses, Evil Monkey has inherited some of its problems from Hiaasen, and others are common to the ongoing literary adaptation epidemic on television. Two twisted characters, Bonnie and Eve (Meredith Hagner plays a broader version of her hilariously deranged Search party The characters, Portia, who weaponize sex and dependency in ways that can only be read as misogynistic, are straight out of the book. The narrator is a crutch that is relied on too often, prone to dropping cliches whose laziness is not mitigated by the writers' self-awareness: “You can only push a man so far before he decides to fight back.” “Trouble always seemed to be looking for him.” A soundtrack of Tom Petty covers – 21 in all – might have been more suited to a southern stoner saga than an island story with a rogue cop. And the series is far too long, with 10 episodes and 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 their subscribers on their platforms as long as possible. Often, this seems to be a criticism of a plot that isn't eventful enough to fill eight or ten episodes. But in many cases, the bigger problem is a cast of characters that fail to charm, captivate, intrigue, or simply entertain us enough to want to spend that many hours with them. In Lawrence's case, how much you enjoy his shows is very much a matter of taste rather than quality. Millions of Ted Lasso And shrinkage Fans love its chaotic, sad talk show hosts and the broad supporting characters that support their search for midlife fulfillment. If you're one of them, you'll probably find Evil Monkey and his troop of islanders, oddballs, a breezy fun.

Still, I'd argue that Lawrence's obsession with personal growth, the way he peppers his show with shrinks and sages, is incompatible with this level of weirdness. It's too hard to wring real psychological insight out of characters who don't speak or act like closed people. (I still cringe at a scene in which the otherwise beautiful, empathetic Rosa steals a “super cute top” from a corpse she's autopsiing and wears it to drinks.) Yancy's epiphany, when it finally comes, feels as out of place as a water-soaked human arm on the end of a fish hook.