With Autumn swiftly approaching, some of us are scrambling to find some indoor activities to involve ourselves in. Working with books as I do, it has become abundantly clear that streaming services are snatching up properties to adapt. Now, I canât speak to the source material. However, after watching these two shows, a question lingers. Does a show work because of the novel or are there other factors that supersede?
AppleTV Plus has been fiendish in acquiring talent and intellectual property. âBad Monkeyâ is one of the latest. Based on a mystery novel by Carl Hiaasen, our first introduction isnât to our detective but to the severed arm that kickstarts the whole mess. A vacationer chartering a fishing excursion hooks the gruesome detritus; in a piece of gallows humor, it is flipping everyone the bird.
Vince Vaughn is asked to take this appendage to the mainland from where it was found in the Keys, the local sheriff wanting nothing to disrupt the resort townâs cashflow. But like all great gumshoes, he canât let this case go. Even when the arm is given over to the widow for burial, his curiosity keeps getting the better of him. I use Vinceâs name instead of the characterâs only because he has played this guy so many times, he has created a brand. This is USDA grade A Vaughn here. With an ex-wife who he lost his job over, he wilds away his day drinking and admiring the fauna. That is until this case, and a horrible yuppie neighbor played by SNLâs Alex Moffat, breaks the monotony. Moffat plays this beautifully too, like an extension of his sketch work as a guy who owns a boat.
Carl Hiaasenâs swampy tales of crimes are so ubiquitous with Florida; they might as well be a part of the tourism boardâs website. There are constant asides to industryâs encroachment on the surrounding environment, from a resort developer ready to bulldoze a side characterâs family home on an idyllic beach to repeated mentions of the red lights in downtown Key West. From the first episode I was hooked, if it wasnât for the next show that held me up.
Netflix has been the primo place to find bestsellers turned their latest scrolling victim. All I can say is, I hope The Perfect Couple is a better novel because whoa boy. There should be a name for this kind over the top rogues gallery of family members/murder suspects that populate these collective pulp fictions. Maybe they should be called tragicomic neuroses, the series. Rich people are just ruthless people with money, right? During a weekend wedding rehearsal dinner, a murder takes place overnight and everyone in this fractured wealthy family is a potential culprit. Only as the show went on, I just wanted to yell out that they all did it so the show would end. What follows is your most nightmarish telenovela with a heavy dose of âThe Californians,â minus the humor.
Nicole Kidman has played these icy matriarchs so well already, however here she is so arch that it borders on parody. When her husband (a criminally under-utilized Liev Schreiber) asks what she is doing in one scene; she says, âJust tying up some loose ends.â You almost expect her to break the fourth wall. This kind of exchange happens twice.
I thought to myself, Liane Moriarty is a better writer than this. That is when I realized that it was actually from Elin Hilderbrand. It all feels like an inferior version of Big Little Lies, interesting because Kidman was featured there as well. Reading that she is no longer writing about Nantucket must come as a relief to the island. Six episodes transpire with such soapy nonsense that is genuinely a shock to see this in September. This is the new âno white after Labor Day.â
