Vaughn is the show’s star, and his divine ability to torque a line reading with the deadpan, the arch, the absurd, or the suspicious makes his performance a “home run,” in Hiaasen’s assessment. But Florida itself holds the center of Bad Monkey. Apple’s budget meant that they could shoot on location. Hiaasen’s role as a consulting producer meant that all the necessary details were spot on: Key deer, Rhum Barbancourt, the slurry inside cut-rate conch fritters, the red lights on costal homes engineered so as not to stun sea turtle hatchings. Bad Monkey feels right because it looks right.
“The main thing I said from the beginning,” Hiaasen says, “was that it has to be shot in Florida, and in the Keys. There isn’t any place that looks like that. I had a pilot shot in Louisiana. Lake Pontchartrain was supposed to look like Biscayne Bay—if you can imagine how many different levels of filters you have to put on Lake Pontchartrain to make it look like Florida.”
For showrunner Bill Lawrence, Bad Monkey represents a stretch. The infrequent moments of darkness on Ted Lasso or Scrubs were purely emotional. That’s not a knock. Lawrence’s métier is programming as welcoming as Florida water. But Bad Monkey features severed body parts, endangered animals having their habitat crushed, and Bahamian places and cultures up for sale. Hiaasen and Lawrence meeting in the middle makes for an ideal marriage: Lawrence permeates the screen with Hiaasen’s immaculate vibes and Hiaasen adds a serrated edge to Lawrence’s prestige-dad tendencies.
Hiaasen told me the story of their partnership both in terms of Bad Monkey’s long gestation and Lawrence’s understanding of his work. Years ago, Lawrence flew to Florida to tell Hiaasen how much he liked the book. After that, Hiaasen says, “We had a bunch of pitch meetings—which are torture for me. Bill’s good at it! This was before Apple TV existed. At the time, you’re sitting in a room with executives. Sometimes they looked confused, like little puppies looking at each other.”
Hiaasen attributed Lawrence and Bad Monkey’s success in capturing “the balance” in his work, the humor of the individual scenes, and the darkness in the overarching plots. The limitations of feature film would carve away the detailed tapestry that makes a Carl Hiaasen book special.
On Apple, the adaptation unfurls with care. Bad Monkey, like the bulk of Hiaasen’s crime novels, is narrated in third-person, giving the novel a cool, ironic distance and the necessary edge of satire. The show took a risk to preserve that, reproducing narration verbatim from the novel and putting it in the mouth of its own narrator, a local charter boat captain (Tom Nowicki).
In the first few chapters of the novel, we meet a typically Hiaasenian set of local freaks. The TV show does them all justice, from the sinister bee expert and extermination pro, to a wastrel of a seafood restauranteur, to a cringe real estate agent (Alex Moffat) desperate to sell a garish, environmentally belligerent mansion next to Yancy’s house. The beats are weighted perfectly, more than local color and less than a full subplot. It emulates the zoom-in zoom-out cadence that makes Hiaasen’s novels so winning.
