Would you like to buy a 'Monkey'?

Vince Vaughn gets his Hiaasen on

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as my former governor begins to call himself “Skink”…

Some housekeeping before we get into into what will be a short, single-subject newsletter this week. I’m working on several big Rolling Stone projects at once, and doing various end-of-summer activities, and gradually submerging myself in the Rod Serling waters(*), so I don’t have a lot to report on this week. And next week, when I should have multiple Rolling Stone articles, I may be too busy to get the newsletter done in time for its usual Friday delivery. Apologies, but we should be on a more regular schedule post-Labor Day.

(*) Speaking of Serling, two things: 1)Even though I knew when I committed to write a biography that Serling was incredibly prolific, especially for someone whose TV career was relatively short, it remains daunting as I keep being reminded of various projects I will have to read, watch, or listen to, and that’s before we get into other kinds of research, interviews, etc. I am going to have Serling on the brain a lot over the next couple of years of this newsletter. 2)As I continue to plow through late-period Twilight Zone episodes before moving onto everything else, this week I watched a Season Four episode called “The Parallel,” about an astronaut who returns from a mission and gradually realizes that he has landed on a parallel world that is identical to his own in most ways, but with differences both small (he’s a colonel rather than a major) and big (no one here has ever heard of JFK). It is, in other words, almost exactly the same plot as Apple’s Constellation. Like most Season Four episodes, there’s not really enough story to justify devoting an hour to it, which makes it even more staggering that anyone thought Constellation should have eight episodes in its first season alone, with a plot designed to continue. (Unsurprisingly, it won’t, because Apple canceled it.)

Now, as to the timelier topic at hand, my big review for the week was of Bad Monkey, the Apple adaptation of Carl Hiassen’s comic thriller, starring Vince Vaughn as a disgraced Florida cop-turned-restaurant inspector who gets mixed up in a mystery involving a severed human arm, a voodoo priestess, a Capuchin monkey (played by Dan Fienberg’s old pal Crystal), Rob Delaney, and more. I have long loved Hiaasen’s novels, going back to the day I randomly pulled a copy of Skin Tight off the shelf at The Mysterious Bookshop and couldn’t stop laughing until I finished. I love Vaughn when he’s in this kind of ingratiating, motormouthed mode. I love the Fletch vibes provided by Bill Lawrence, who adapted Hiaasen’s book and once upon a time tried to make a Fletch movie with Zach Braff, who has a small role here as the colorfully-named Israel O’Peele. (This, by the way, is your reminder that there is a fantastic Fletch movie, Confess, Fletch, with Jon Hamm, that’s streaming on Paramount+ as we speak. Come for The Twilight Zone archive, stay for the Hamm/Slattery reunion!) I love the music of Tom Petty and the works of Richard Russo, both of which are quoted liberally here. The vibes, as the kids probably still don’t say, are immaculate.

That said, if I’m going to complain earlier in this newsletter about another Apple show not having enough story to fill its season, I have to do that here. Plot has never been Hiaasen’s strength to begin with, but this isn’t a particularly coherent story even by his standards, and it’s one Lawrence could have probably told in half the time. The difference between this and Constellation, though, is that everything other than the plot is very entertaining, particularly if you’re dialed into the same influences, and enjoy Vaughn being back on his bullshit.

So go read the review, watch the show, and I imagine we’ll talk about it again at some point between now and when the finale drops in a couple of months.

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?