Hiaasen’s ‘Bad Monkey’ swings onto Apple TV+

A quiz for Floridians: Where would you find an angler reeling in a severed human arm, a new waterfront McMansion with a mysterious plague of dead raccoons and live bees, an obeah practitioner casting deadly spells on developers, a surly capuchin monkey and a detective demoted for using his police vehicle to push a golf cart driven by the husband of his “future former girlfriend” off a dock in Key West?In a Carl Hiaasen novel, of course. (And if you did not pass, please hand in your Florida card.)All that wacky Floridiana, and much more, is to be found in Hiaasen’s 2013 novel “Bad Monkey” — and now it’s been brought to the screen by Apple TV+. A 10-episode series based on “Bad Monkey” drops on the streaming service starting Aug. 14.Hiaasen is the author of more than 20 bestselling books for adults and kids as well as a longtime crusading columnist for the Miami Herald . A native Floridian, he’s beloved for his razor wit, skilled deployment of the Florida Man trope, deep love for his home state and anger at its despoilment. He is, in short, a Sunshine State treasure.The “Bad Monkey” series stars Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy, a former police detective. Vaughn plays him as world-weary but sharply intelligent, desperate to get his old job back after being suspended and unable to resist investigating mysteries.Like, for example, that severed arm, its fingers firmly fixed in an obscene gesture, fished out of the turquoise waters off the Keys by a tourist in the series’ opening scene. Packed in a cooler, it comes into Yancy’s custody because there’s no obvious clue whose arm it was and no certainty whether it was removed by a shark or something more dangerous, like a human.So Yancy’s former partner delivers a message from their boss: Hand it off (sorry) to the Miami coroner’s office and let them identify it.Yancy complains, but the errand introduces him to Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez). Rosa is an attractive young woman whose job as a coroner might be getting to her. In one scene, we see her commenting on the clothing of a corpse she’s about to autopsy: “Cute top!” A few scenes later, she sashays into a bar at happy hour wearing it.Yancy is intrigued. He’s been bored, whiling away his suspension by torturing the smarmy real estate salesman who’s trying to sell a hideous spec house next door to Yancy’s little old-school house on the beach. He’s also continuing his affair with Bonnie, the woman whose husband he dunked. She’s played with steamy elan by Michelle Monaghan.Yancy is briefly elated when she tells him her husband has dropped the charges. But there’s a condition: Before he gets to be a detective again, Yancy has to do time on what he calls “roach patrol,” inspecting restaurant kitchens for disgusting health violations, of which Key West’s tourist eateries contain multitudes. (Don’t order the soup.)So where does the titular monkey come in? Not in the kitchen, fortunately. There’s a separate plotline that begins on a nearby island, Andros in the Bahamas. The monkey, whose name is Driggs, is the companion of a young man named Neville Stafford, played by Ronald Peet. Neville earns a living fishing and lives in a tiny seaside house his father built. He’s a happy man, aside from dealing with the rambunctious Driggs, whom he won in a bet and who’s rumored to have appeared in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”Neville’s life is upended by the construction nearby of a sprawling new resort. The developers bought the land Neville lives on from his sister, over his protests, and he tries to stop them from taking it by requesting the services of a woman known as the Dragon Queen, who practices obeah, a West African religion common in the Caribbean. But her price keeps going up.By the end of the second episode provided for review by Apple, those two plots begin to tie together, with the promise of many twists to come.This is the third book of Hiaasen’s to come to the screen, after “Strip Tease” (1996) and “Hoot” (2006). Despite their bizarrely colorful characters and wild plots, his books are a conundrum to film because so much of their great charm comes from Hiaasen’s hilarious writing style.“Bad Monkey,” fortunately, has a showrunner with a solid record for combining the funny and the heartfelt: Bill Lawrence’s resume includes “Ted Lasso” and “Scrubs.”The series boasts a solid cast and plenty of gorgeous locations in and around Key West. And the script hits the right combination of deadpan and zany to evoke Hiaasen’s style. For his legions of fans, it’s a treat to hold us until his next novel comes out.The first two episodes drop on Apple TV+ on Aug. 14, with new episodes each Wednesday through Oct. 9.

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