Underdog fights back in detective drama

• Published date: 20 August 2024
• Publication title: Signal

MOST Apple TV+ shows are cut from the same plain cloth. They tend to have massive budgets, A-list actors and competent storytelling, but, with a handful of exceptions (Severance, Slow Horses, Sunny, basically all the S’s) they also tend to be relatively forgettable. Fine, entertaining even, but somehow flimsy and fleeting, too. Like the electronic products that made the company’s fortune, it’s all smooth lines and clean corners, which is good for laptops and phones. But when it comes to TV, Apple’s output has often erred on the side of caution

So it is again with Bad Monkey, which stars Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy, a disgraced detective unofficially working a case in the Florida Keys. Yancy is off the job after assaulting his lover’s dodgy husband by ramming his golf cart into the water. Even though he has been suspended from the job he clearly loves, bloke’s bloke Yancy is happy at home. He enjoys simple pleasures, such as playfully trying to stop the sale of the megamansion next door to his modest house, and having a nice drink on his sunlounger while staring out at the waves.

But the calm waters of his life are interrupted when a severed arm arrives on his doorstep. It was pulled out of the Keys by a honeymooner chartering a fishing boat, who got more than the marlin he was banking on. Yancy’s ex-partner in policing, Rogelio (John Ortiz), arrives with this unwanted gift. Nobody will take on the arm or the associated paperwork. The police don’t want it, the morgue doesn’t want it. Yancy’s job is ostensibly one of safe-keeping, but Rogelio knows that it is also a kind of bait to lure him back into detective work. After a wild goose chase, in which Yancy attempts to fob it off on a spirited Miami forensic pathologist who claims not to fancy him (wink wink, I’m sure that won’t change at all), he sticks it in his freezer.

You know what they say about recently suspended cops: dangle a severed arm in front of them, and they’re like a dog with a collar bone. “To get his job back, all Yancy had to do was stay out of trouble,” says the narrator. Naturally, Yancy is drawn to the mystery like a moth to a limb-shaped flame. Was it a shark attack? Or something more malign? Why does the alleged arm-owner’s widow Eve...