Perhaps this is also the beginning of a Vince Vaughn aisle. He was best known in the 2000s for his roles as egocentric villains in comedies such as Old School (2003) and The Wedding Crashers (2005), Vaughn played a darker role as a criminal in True Detectives polarizing second season. As far as crime series go, Evil Monkey The funny protagonist seems to fit Vaughn’s style of talkative, smart, stupid guys better.

Andrew Yancy (Vaughn), whose mouth sometimes outstrips his wisdom or his instinct for self-preservation, is a former Monroe County Sheriff’s detective who was suspended from duty after an unfortunate incident in which he drove his car off a pier carrying a golf cart carrying the wealthy husband of the woman he is casually involved with. Broke, he’s forced to work as a health inspector, tracking down seedy Key West bars for rat-infested kitchens, when his old partner Rogelio (John Ortiz) convinces him to take on an unusual assignment.

A day-tripper on a fishing boat accidentally picks up a severed human arm, and Sheriff Sonny Sommers (Todd Allen Durkin), anxious to protect the Keys’ tourism-dependent public image, wants the arm to become another jurisdiction’s problem. Yancy agrees to take the arm, its middle finger defiantly extended, to the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner for examination. There he meets the intelligent and attractive Assistant Medical Examiner Rosa Campesino (Martinez), who brings him the unwelcome news that the arm doesn’t match any corpse. The two decide to get to the bottom of it.

Meanwhile, we meet Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), a young man from the Bahamas living a contented, aimless life as a Caribbean beach bum. Neville lives in paradise, fishing, drinking, and hanging out with his pet monkey Driggs all day. That’s what he does until an aggressive white man (Delaney) and his flirtatious but dangerous wife (Meredith Hagner) start buying up Neville’s property to build a resort. They incur Neville’s ire, as well as the ire of an Obeah medicine woman named Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), Dragon Queen’s grandmother and mentor Ya-Ya (L. Scott Caldwell), and local thug Egg (David St. Louis).

The show’s tension comes in part from wondering how the Florida and Bahamas storylines will converge. There’s also a subplot involving Yancy’s casual lover Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan), who, it turns out, has a bigger past than Yancy or anyone else thought, and cameos from Zach Braff (of Scrubs And Garden State) as a problematic doctor and Scott Glenn (who needs no introduction) as Yancy’s father.

Some of the show’s decisions are a bit confusing. There is an occasional voiceover from a Arrested development-style narrator (Tom Nowicki), whose interjections seem unnecessary but perhaps help to introduce a touch of Hiaasen’s wry authorial voice. Then there is the show’s soundtrack, which includes several pinprick moments with songs familiar from other films or television series, including Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” (best known from pulp Fiction), the steel drum instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “PIMP” (closely linked to the recent film Anatomy of a fall) and Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” (as intro music for TheWire). Is this some kind of tongue-in-cheek wink or just an incredibly lazy choice of music? I can’t say.

I can say that Evil Monkey Production quality is otherwise good, with lush cinematography making full use of the show’s locations. The cast and acting are also good, despite the occasional shaky Bahamian accent, although I wonder if Delaney, a natural comedian, could have been given more room for humor or exaggeration.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel and there are more than a few cliches, including the obligatory scene where two characters share a moment of romantic tension but are interrupted by a ringing phone. All in all, though, Evil Monkey has a pleasantly droll sensibility, a sense of pace, and some clever twists. The show’s climax is a little disappointing – but it leaves room for a possible second season that might end up being more important.

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J. Oliver Conroy’s article was published in Guardian, new York Magazine that ViewersThe New criterionand other publications.