Is Bad Monkey any good?
Most notably and, in my opinion, the one and only thing anyone really needs to know about this show, is that it stars Vince Vaughn as the main character, Andrew Yancey, a detective who has been suspended from duty following an incident involving his ex-girlfriend's husband. Yancey is pleasantly enjoying his suspension by sipping cocktails on his lawn and staring out at the sea, at his home in the Keys, until a local fisherman reels in a severed arm instead of a fish, thus kicking off what will be the plot of the show.
Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that we are now in what I believe are the end days of the The Golden Age of Television, the hallowed period over the past 20-years or so that saw the creation of such prestige TV classics as The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. These shows are -- as someone once said -- our cathedrals of today; they are the very pinnacle of visual entertainment over the last 20 years. I challenge you to name a movie that's had more impact than any one of these shows.
Anyway... it's also been at least 15 years now since the dawning and subsequent proliferation of streaming TV, to the point where it has now taken over everything and virtually strangled the box office, feature-length film industry to death or, at the very least, pummeled it into a new and somewhat sad shadow of its former self. When Netflix got the brilliant idea to develop and produce its own exclusive content -- shows like Lilyhammer (2012) -- to be available only on its own platform, it was only a short time before other streaming services popped up and followed suit.
Fast forward a decade or so and it seems like not only are there now at least a dozen streaming services, but they all seem to have their own original content. For a while, this seemed great. There was this vast proliferation of new shows, new voices, new entertainment. The TV industry had become this giant vacuum cleaner that was sucking up stories into it and spewing out a buffet of visual entertainment the likes of which the world had never seen.
Except that the eventual result of that is now, as we're approaching 2025, there is a certain level of "Where's the beef?" Like...what happened to the good shows? What's with all this thin gruel? What happened to the Golden Age of Television?
To me, Bad Monkey fits somewhere within this broader context, the idea that we are now on the other side of the slope (specifically, we are on the down slope) following the peak of the Golden Age and are spending the hours and nights of our lives getting episodes and episodes deep into lukewarm streaming TV shows, hoping they are going to yield us some high quality entertainment...and then being disappointed.
Lest this become more of a rant than a review (I probably crossed that line a while back)... Bad Monkey is -- at best -- a halfway decent show that is completely carried by Vince Vaughn. If there were a no-name actor in the role of Yancey, this show would not even be watchable. At worst, it's unsatisfying and forgettable, like eating popcorn for dinner.
By all means, watch a few episodes and see if you get into it. There are some interesting plot twists and, other than Vince Vaughn, you do get some pretty good eye candy in the form of Rachel Monaghan (True Detective, Season 1), although she's way, way under-utilized IMHO, and the other supporting actresses like Jodie Turner-Smith, Natalie Martinez, and Meredith Hagner, all of whom are pretty new to me. But, overall, a lot of the dialogue just seems forced and -- if you're like me -- you end up checking your phone a lot, even pausing the show to go do other things, and never coming back to it.
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