‘Bad Monkey’ brings Carl Hiaasen’s dark satire to streaming TV

Vince Vaughn is a testy detective trying to solve a murder in his new series Bad Monkey, premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+, and he tells ABC Audio what intrigued him about the role.

“I just love that he was a guy that, you know, despite the obvious odds, he couldn’t let this thing go,” he says. “He just was like the Energizer Bunny. Never, never going to give up, never going to stop pursuing.”

The series is based on the book by Carl Hiaasen, and while his books have sold millions of copies, Hollywood hasn’t been successful at adapting them to screens, big or small — take the 1996 flop Striptease starring Demi Moore, for example. However, showrunner Bill Lawrence believed streaming could change that.

“Everybody that biffed it in movies thought they had this kind of cool airplane book caper that could be a movie in 90 minutes,” he says. “But the truth is, they’re these surreal satire character pieces, and if you can do them over 10 episodes, you got a chance.”

Like many of Hiaasen’s works, Bad Monkey is set in the Florida Keys — not a bad place to spend a few months filming, according to Vaughn.

“I loved it, it was like, the nature was incredible,” he says. “The Key deer that we have in the show actually came around a lot, on the set. They were beautiful. The water’s amazing. The views, I mean, the world is just esthetically gorgeous and the wildlife was very unique.”

“You do get sucked in when you’re there and there’s a nice breeze coming off the water, so the bugs aren’t as bad,” agrees Lawrence. “I think after three weeks I would start to lose my mind. It’s like being on a deserted island, man.”