‘Bad Monkey’ Episode 1 Recap: Of Severed Limbs And Curses

As long and lanky Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) ignores his chirping phone and pours a Barbancourt while sitting in the backyard of his turquoise Florida ranch, which looks out onto an ambling pier and a glittery expanse of ocean, you might imagine taking the Adirondack chair next to him and hanging out awhile. Which is exactly the vibe encouraged by Bad Monkey, Vaughn’s engaging new series for Apple TV+ that adapts Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 novel of the same name. Vaughn, as Yancy, is maybe a tick or two slower in the fast-talking department that the actor’s been chairman of literally since Swingers. Maybe that owes to age, or the laid-back oceanside life of the Florida Keys, but it works here immediately as the funny, perceptive Yancy, who seems to have never met a woman who he wasn’t curious to speak with further, and who masks his naturally investigative mind behind the same sense of charm. When we first meet him, sitting in that chair and sipping on rum, Andrew Yancy is a police detective for the Keys sheriff’s department. Well, a suspended police detective. But by the end of this highly enjoyable hangout of a first episode, he’s turned in his badge and his service weapon and his beat-up Crown Victoria, maybe for good. And it all started with a severed arm giving him the finger.

“Who’s dancing? There’s no dance. I’m suspended. What-what–how am I dancing?” Can’t you just hear Vince Vaughn saying this in his trademark Vince Vaughn cadence? It’s Rogelio (John Ortiz), Yancy’s best buddy and partner on the force, who first gives him the arm. And the last thing he wants to do is interrupt his suspension and rum-flavored reverie in order to deliver the appendage, with its ripped flesh and platinum wedding ring, to Miami-Dade PD. But the sheriff, his boss, wants it out of the Keys. Rogelio even tells him to just feed it to an alligator along the way, if he feels like it. Nobody in charge in the Keys wants the heat this arm represents. But Yancy is innately curious. And when he drops the limb on Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), the Miami-Dade medical examiner, she’s one reason to keep asking questions. There is the wedding ring, still on its finger. But Rosa observes that the arm’s owner lost his watch along the way. There’s no match in her system for a body missing an arm. Yancy – “What if this wasn’t an accident?” – puts it on ice in his freezer instead.

Which is where Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan) finds it, who immediately freaks out. Bonnie, not her real name, is Yancy’s mysterious and married fling who loans him books – we like the reference to Richard Russo’s 1993 novel Nobody’s Fool in a series already based on Hiaasen novel from 2013 – and brings over vintage bottles of bordeaux to go with fresh-caught blue crab on the grill and sex in the shower. Bonnie, whose dermatologist husband is pressing the charges that led to Yancy’s suspension. (He may or may not have rammed the doctor’s golf cart until it launched him into the bay.) Bonnie, who Bad Monkey’s charter boat captain narrator calls Yancy’s future former girlfriend who he’s said goodbye forever to for the thousandth time. (We’ll see here again, hopefully – Michelle Monaghan is just terrific and totally underrated.) But our narrator, a rascally local charter boat captain (Tom Nowicki) who knows all and sees all, he’s got another side of the story to introduce.

Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet) loves to chill near the ocean just as much as Yancy does, but his fishing cottage is on the water in the Bahamas. Until it’s threatened to be overrun by Curly Tail Lane, that is, a resort monstrosity that a government inspector says is already a done deal. Neville’s half-sister in Florida has the land title, and she sold Neville’s home and land to an American developer known only as Christopher (Rob Delaney). Neville and Driggs, the diapered pet monkey he won in a card game, are at a loss about how to fight back. So, willing to try anything, he approaches Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), the island’s well-known purveyor of Obeah sorcery, to craft a really good curse that’ll stick to Christopher like glue. Neville’s meeting with Dragon Queen, aka Gracie, is full of candlelight, veiled references to evil, and sexual suggestion. But it’s his encounter with Christopher himself on a rain-swept beach that feels even more dangerous. 

Yancy goes from simply suspended to fucking fired in a heartbeat, after the sheriff disagrees with his snooping around for more dirt on the severed limb, in the Keys and with Rosa Campesino in Miami. It turns out the appendage belongs to a guy named Nick Stripling, whose second wife Eve (Meredith Hagner) arrives in the Keys to collect it. Yancy doesn’t believe Eve’s displays of grief, and questions why she chose to mourn by flying off for a long weekend in the Bahamas. There are guys Yancy makes as federal agents observing Stripling’s funeral service – “No banter? I thought we were gonna banter!” Never change, Vince Vaughn – and Caitlin (Charlotte Lawerence), Eve’s stepdaughter, straight up accuses her of murdering Nick. 

That’s a lot of strings to pull on. Enough that it doesn’t even matter anymore, that whole no longer being a police detective thing. Yancy can’t let it go. He won’t. “I gotta know what happened to this clown.” Especially because there are more awkward clues, like shark’s teeth embedded in the arm that belong not to a deep sea fish, where the limb was found, but shallow water dwellers not known for ripping human limbs from bodies. Like the fact that everybody, including the Keys sheriff’s department and even Rogelio, want the arm out of the way without an investigation. And like the fact that, while Yancy and the charter captain are enjoying a few beers at the bar, his former first mate who originally discovered the arm gets shot in a targeted drive-by. He’d recently come into some cash, too. Crack open a few more cold Kalik lagers. Because the connections between the phantom limb, the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, Eve and Christopher, and probably Yancy and Neville, are as intriguing as the Dragon Queen’s dark obeah magic.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.