In the season finale of the Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey, former detective Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) and Bahamian fisherman Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet) are hot on the trail of Eve and Nick Stripling (Meredith Hagner and Rob Delaney), a couple whose elaborate insurance fraud scheme has left a trail of bodies—and one severed arm—in its wake. Yancy is dismayed to find that the couple’s compound on Andros Island has a new bodyguard, complicating his plan to extradite the Striplings back to Florida. “You can always find people in Andros who will do anything for money,” Neville explains.
“Yeah, you know, Las Vegas is like that, but it usually involves people putting ping-pong balls in weird places,” Yancy responds. “It’s super disturbing. You don’t wanna know about it.”
After a quick back-and-forth about their next steps, however, Neville can’t help himself: “The ping-pong balls in Las Vegas … are they sometimes in people’s butts?” Yancy doesn’t need a second invitation. “Only in the classy joints,” he clarifies. “Listen, if I teach you one thing, then I want you to remember this: Never stay in Las Vegas for more than one night. You’re going to be tempted to go for two, but you’re gonna regret it every single time.” (Honestly? Solid advice.)
A tangent about people putting ping-pong balls in weird places in Las Vegas epitomizes Bad Monkey: a series where life-and-death scenarios don’t preclude characters from shooting the shit. Bad Monkey’s wacky tone is consistent with the eponymous source text from Carl Hiaasen, the bestselling author who’s been described, not inaccurately, as the “Mark Twain of Florida Men.” But having compelling source material is just one part of the equation: Before Bad Monkey, Hiaasen adaptations like Striptease and Hoot floundered on the big screen. Clearly, the key to the show’s success was finding a collaborator adept at shifting from serious to silly (and back to serious) at a moment’s notice. Enter Bill Lawrence.
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A prolific showrunner who began his career in the late ’90s, Lawrence excels at a brand of television he calls “comedy with emotional undercurrent.” That was certainly the case with Scrubs, Lawrence’s beloved medical sitcom, which was as capable of moving viewers to tears as it was reveling in Zach Braff cranking up the Toto. But perhaps the secret sauce of any Lawrence show is that you simply want to spend time with the characters: The plot doesn’t have to move forward with any real urgency because the vibes are so good. If Richard Linklater is the king of hangout cinema, then Lawrence may hold the crown on the small screen.
But as the television landscape evolved over the years, Lawrence had trouble replicating his early success on the major networks. In the past decade, Whiskey Cavalier, Life Sentence, and a small-screen reimagining of Rush Hour were all canceled after one season. (Personally, I’m still not over the premature end of Whiskey Cavalier, which somehow managed to be a wholesome espionage dramedy.) For a time, it seemed like Lawrence’s style had gone out of vogue. “My joke is that my voice is my voice and I’ve been doing the same thing all these years and sometimes it’s cool and sometimes it’s not cool and then it’s cool again,” Lawrence told The Hollywood Reporter last year. But broadcast television’s loss has become streaming’s gain—more specifically, Apple TV+’s.
Since its launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has emerged as an underrated—and tragically underviewed—streamer that offers some of the best high-end programming outside of HBO. The streamer, in turn, cornered the market in a few categories, including but not limited to big-budget sci-fi (Foundation, Silo, For All Mankind, Severance), historical dramas (Masters of the Air, Franklin, Manhunt), and women-led prestige plays (The Morning Show, Bad Sisters, Lessons in Chemistry, Palm Royale). But one of Apple’s biggest success stories to date might be the Bill Lawrence corner: In addition to Bad Monkey, he’s a cocreator of Ted Lasso and Shrinking.
While streamers are typically cagey about sharing viewership numbers, you don’t need cold, hard data to know that Ted Lasso was a bona fide hit—capped off by winning 13 Emmys, including Outstanding Comedy Series for its second season. Following an American football coach inexplicably hired to manage a Premier League soccer club, Ted Lasso’s title character (played by cocreator Jason Sudeikis) is initially met with hostile resistance from players and fans alike. But it doesn’t take long for the Lawrence DNA to kick in: By the end of the first season, Ted has ingratiated himself to everyone at AFC Richmond, helping them grow as people in ways both silly and profound. Just as Scrubs turned a hospital into an unlikely setting for a hangout show, Ted Lasso did the same with a sports team.
Of course, Ted Lasso’s feel-good factor infamously soured later into its run, which happened to coincide with Lawrence passing off more of the showrunning duties to Sudeikis, who oversaw a troubled production for Season 3. (“The third year, it would’ve been criminal for it not to have been 100 percent [Sudeikis’s] voice,” Lawrence told Vulture last year.) But even if Ted Lasso never quite lived up to the near-universal acclaim around its debut—and may struggle to reclaim that goodwill with rumblings of a fourth season nobody’s asking for—the series was a reminder that Lawrence’s brand of comedy hasn’t gone extinct: It just needed to find a new home on streaming.
To that end, Apple and Lawrence doubled down on their promising partnership with Shrinking, which returns for its second season on October 16. The dramedy concerns therapist Jimmy Laird (cocreator Jason Segel), who, in the midst of grieving his wife’s death, decides that he’s going to tell his patients what he really thinks of their problems. On paper, a therapist navigating an existential crisis doesn’t sound like a fun time, but Shrinking settles into a familiar, low-key rhythm in which Jimmy’s life interweaves with those of his coworkers, patients, friends, and neighbors in (mostly) charming circumstances. The show is still plot driven, but it moves at a leisurely pace—frankly, Shrinking is never better than when it feels like you’re a fly on the wall as characters go about their day. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the series has a likable ensemble to lean on that includes Jessica Williams, Christa Miller, and, incredibly, Harrison Ford.
As Lawrence has teased, the prevailing theme of Shrinking’s second season will be forgiveness. Apple hasn’t lifted the embargo for Season 2, so I can’t disclose much beyond that, but I think it’s safe to reveal that if you liked Shrinking’s first season, the series gives viewers more of the same: flawed but well-meaning characters getting way too involved in one another’s lives. As in Ted Lasso, this formula threatens to become a bit saccharine, but so far, Shrinking has stayed in the Goldilocks zone of wholesomeness.
Wholesomeness is far from the first word that comes to mind when watching Bad Monkey, which opens with tourists fishing a severed arm off of the Floridian coast. In that respect, the series marks a departure from Lawrence’s previous projects: a little less lighthearted, a little more macabre. At the same time, the reason that Lawrence and Hiaasen go together like peanut butter and jelly is because the violence doesn’t hang over Bad Monkey like a dark cloud—the severed arm, for instance, just so happens to be giving the finger. Meanwhile, the show’s protagonist isn’t a moody detective, but a charismatic motormouth who talks his way in or out of trouble; in other words, it’s a note-perfect role for an actor of Vaughn’s talents. Like the women Yancy becomes entangled with, you’re charmed by the character against your better judgment.
Still, the overt sentimentality that Lawrence brings to his dramedies wouldn’t mesh well with Bad Monkey, which is populated by an eccentric and mostly unpleasant collection of Florida Men and Women. (Hagner is a particular standout, playing a bikini-clad Lady Macbeth orchestrating much of the chaos.) Instead, what you get is the television equivalent of a summer beach read: pulpy and propulsive, yet breezy and undemanding. But like Lawrence’s best shows, you can’t help but love hanging out in the world of Bad Monkey and with the quirky characters who inhabit it, warts and all.
By season’s end, Bad Monkey ties up all its loose ends—a welcome reprieve from crime shows that try to stretch out a mystery for years to come. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Bad Monkey is a one-and-done proposition. “By the way, I got something in my car,” Yancy’s bestie on the force, Rogelio (John Ortiz), tells him as they sip rum by the ocean. “It’s not strictly police business, but I got a feeling something fucked up went down. Wanna take a look for me?” Yancy dismisses the offer, having just given a quick spiel about how he’s no longer going to obsess over injustices and simply live his life. But even if the book is closed on the mystery of the severed arm, Yancy can’t resist opening a new chapter.
“What’s in the car, man?”
