The Five Spot: 'Bad Monkey' Has The Juice

Also this week: Nicolas Cage is John Madden (???) and a kangaroo jailbreak

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go…

FIVE: Here’s your last summer watch of 2024

Well, hello. Are you looking for a fun little late-summer show to watch? Maybe a mystery about a murder where there’s a wisecracking detective who gets his badge and gun taken away for being a loose cannon who plays by his own rules? One where the bad guys are very bad and the vibes are good and maybe there’s a little voodoo and a rascal monkey and it all takes place in the sweaty Florida Keys?

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Bad Monkey, a new show that just debuted on Apple TV+ this week. The official description goes like this.

A detective turned restaurant inspector in Southern Florida is pulled into a world of greed and corruption after a tourist finds a severed arm while fishing. And yes, there's a monkey.

The show is based on the book of the same name by Carl Hiaasen, a beach read king who specializes in Florida idiots getting in over their heads. This is exactly that, but in visual form. Vince Vaughn plays our protagonist, Andrew Yancy, a man who loves solving murders and sipping beers on his patio and mysterious women with secrets. The character is very much like Jon Hamm’s version of Fletch, fast-talking and fun without the acidic taste some Vince Vaughn characters leave behind. The rest of the cast is fun, too, with Michele Monaghan and Meredith Hagner and Rob Delaney and a bunch of other people giving this the exact energy it needs. Jodie Turner-Smith plays a Bahamian black magic practitioner named the Dragon Queen and is mesmerizing in every second she’s on the screen. The titular bad monkey is played by the same monkey that played Annie’s Boobs on Community. Alex Moffat plays a dipshit real estate agent whose perpetual torture at the hands of Yancy delivers almost unending glee. It’s a good time.

And yes, this all goes back to the thing I talked about a while ago about needing a nice Friday night show to watch sometimes. Bad Monkey might not rise to the level of Prestige TV, at least not as we’ve come to define it, with The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad and whatever else. I think sometimes we’ve all set our standards a little too high on that, like two decades of remarkable television has thrown off our sensors and led us to believe that anything short of earth-moving is somehow a disappointment. Maybe that’s just me and I’m projecting my stuff onto you. Either way, it’s nice to remember that there’s always room to chill out and relax and watch a fun little show about a detective and a coroner solving a primate-adjacent mystery in humidity so thick you could eat it with a spoon.

Get in there. You deserve it. Watch Bad Monkey.

FOUR: Every name George Clooney dropped in his new GQ interview