Review: Bad Monkey, "We’re in the Memory-Making Business" | Season 1, Episode 10

Programming Note: If you want to talk more about Bad Monkey’s first season, join us for a live Substack chat with me and Liam at 3pm ET on Friday, October 11 in the Substack App.

He’s not Tom Petty, but while I watched Bad Monkey’s Season 1 finale, I kept hearing Lou Reed singing “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” The theme of accountability—whether voluntarily accepted or not—is all over “We’re in the Memory-Making Business.” Every character’s chickens come home to roost, their bills come due—whatever cliche you want to use to express the idea that actions have consequences. For some, it’s a happy ending. It’s pretty painful for the rest. For Yancy, the ending is bittersweet. But everyone comes away changed—even Driggs. He forgives, but he doesn’t forget. 

The first character to face the music is Gracie, the once and forever Dragon Queen. She summoned the storm to the island, and unfortunately she’s the one the island takes for a sacrifice, as Eve impales her on a tree branch. It’s a sad and unfair ending for Gracie, and the first time I watched the episode I didn’t like it. On my second watch, however, I accepted its cosmic inevitability. Of all the main characters, Gracie is the only one who denies her true nature. Nick Stripling isn’t as bad as Eve, but he was always a crook, so he wasn’t acting out of character when he started committing more extreme crimes—he was just giving in to becoming the worst version of himself. Gracie, though, is a good person who is meant to help others and protect her island’s environment from colonizers. It’s a real sin for her to sell her soul, and she’s punished for it. Most of all, though, she was never going to leave that island. She accepted that fact, made peace with Ya-Ya and her mother and everything she was struggling against, and then let go. 

At first I wanted her to be physically present during the final showdown between Yancy and the Striplings, because I thought the ending should directly weave the Yancy and Gracie strands together, but her spiritual fingerprints are all over everything that happens after her death. I mean, Eve dies because Gracie put a curse on her. Obviously Eve was going to choke on a baby carrot, but then the show escalated from what was expected by having her fall off a roof and smash her head open. And then her beloved dog Tilly, who has developed a taste for blood because Eve keeps spilling it around her, comes over and laps her up. Talk about consequences. 

The Striplings’ story also doesn’t end exactly how I thought, but how it happens is ultimately more satisfying. In the penultimate episode, the show drops hints that Nick is going to do one last thing to redeem himself, but that’s not what happens. Instead, he dies pathetically, unable to fight back as Eve dumps him into the ocean. He accepts how badly he messed up by choosing a “fucking sociopath” who discards him when he’s no longer of use to her over his daughter, but he doesn’t do anything about it. By then it’s too late. His sins are too great to be forgiven by a last-minute change of heart, and he dies in the same manner that he faked at the beginning of the season. It’s a particularly resonant ending for its harshness. It’s a reminder that crime doesn’t pay. 

The only character to get a totally happy ending is Neville. Everything goes his way. He ends up with Dawnie, gets his land back, gets his monkey back, and gets a financial windfall in the form of Nick’s watch. Neville’s ending is so happy, in fact, that he doesn’t face any consequences for his actions. Neville’s a kind and brave guy, but everything he does is ultimately for himself, and he does some unkind things throughout the season, especially giving Driggs away in pursuit of revenge. Even at the end, he steals Nick’s watch, which rightfully should go to Caitlin, who ends up much worse off than him. Accountability is not enforced equally or perfectly on Bad Monkey, but that’s life.

Which brings us to Andrew Yancy, whose ending is perfect. Like Roland Deschain at the end of The Dark Tower, he ends up exactly where he started, but with something he didn’t have before that will get him closer to his goal next time. The moment where he’s being dragged through the water and lets go of the rope is the most beautiful shot of the season, just Yancy’s head floating alone in the vast water with a light rain falling while Sharon Van Etten’s cover of “I Won’t Back Down” plays. The climactic moment of the season feels climactic and earned. The real story all along wasn’t Yancy catching the Striplings; it was Yancy letting go of chasing an impossible desire that was killing him—literally so, in that moment. And so even though he returns to his equilibrium—“basically happy, but with no one to share it with,” and intrigued by detective work he shouldn’t get involved in—he is capable of doing things he was not before. He can love, and he can let go. 

I’m sorry to see Rosa go, but I like where her story ends up. She and Yancy have great chemistry, but they’re not necessarily right for each other. He can’t even pronounce her name. I hope to see her again down the road, but I would be okay if she’s gone for good and Yancy has a new love interest next season. Natalie Martinez deserves to be on a show, any show, for more than one season, though. I hope Bad Monkey leads to something good for her. 

I also wouldn’t mind seeing Bonnie again, but only if she’s actually part of the story next time. Her lack of meaningful integration is Bad Monkey’s biggest flaw. The question I’ve been asking myself about Bonnie is whether the thematic and comedic value of her subplot was worth the time spent on it, or would the show have been better served with a tighter, more focused story without her? After much consideration, I’ve decided it would be tighter. As great as Michelle Monaghan is in the role, the character started out as one thing and then whiplashed into another by the second episode, which indicates that the writers never had a great handle on her. The Bonnie-heavy midseason episodes are the ones that dragged, and I don’t think there’s much we learned about Yancy through Bonnie that we couldn’t have learned through other characters and events. It wouldn’t have been too hard for the writers to come up with a reason why Yancy was suspended from the force that didn’t have to do with Bonnie. Take out Bonnie and a few moments with Gracie and Ya-Ya, and there’s not a single boring moment in Bad Monkey, and a show should be ruthless in eliminating boring moments—one easy solution would be reducing the episode order from 10 to 8, encouraging more efficient story choices.

I really hope it does return, though, as I enjoyed watching this show so much. It has such a great tone, in that sweet spot of dark and breezy. The world is specific, with colorful characters and a distinctive visual identity. There’s nothing else exactly like it on TV right now, and the shows it’s kind of like—Only Murders in the Building and You come to mind—are the kinds of shows we all wish there were more of. It’s the kind of easy-to-watch, procedural-ish, character-driven show that we used to take for granted and now long for. Because Carl Hiaasen has another Andew Yancy novel—Razor Girl, a copy of which appears in Bad Monkey’s opening credits—there’s already a blueprint for Season 2. It seems to me like an easy pickup for Apple TV+, as long as Vince Vaughn and Bill Lawrence want to do it. And the only reason why they wouldn’t is because it’s too hot and there are too many bugs in Florida.

Stray observations 

• Bad Monkey is ultimately a good show, not a great one, in part because the technical imperfections are noticeable and numerous enough to knock a couple of points off its overall grade. For example, the same audio of Gracie saying “Time to end this” is used at the end of episode 9 and the start of this episode in a way that almost makes sense temporally, but doesn’t quite, and it’s jarring enough to take me out of the moment. It’s somewhat of a piece with the very obviously unmatched ADR all season. Almost every time there’s a long enough shot that they can try to get away with it, the actors’ lips and what they’re saying don’t line up. It feels just a little bit sloppy.1 

• Did you catch how Yancy’s instruction to Neville to “Never stay in Las Vegas for more than one night” is sort of a double reference? Vince Vaughn talking about Vegas, baby, Vegas will always remind of Swingers, but there’s also an echo of Ted Lasso’s Coach Beard, who memorably says of Sin City, “One night is good, two nights is perfect, three is too many.” Bill Lawrence’s characters don’t have the same opinion about Las Vegas, but they have one.

• I love Egg showing up with a subcontractor who’s even scarier and more taciturn than him. Bacon’s single line snapping at Eve was probably my biggest laugh of the episode. It was either that, Eve doing the “screw loose” gesture when Yancy tells the Andros cops she’s a murderer, or Eve saying “Don’t talk to me like that in front of Egg. You know how horny it makes me when you take charge.” Meredith Hagner is Bad Monkey’s undisputed MVP.

• When Richard Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool showed up earlier in the season, I wondered what its thematic significance was. I got my answer this episode: Yancy relates to the way a character feels about being powerless to stop fucking up. I feel you, bro. 

• I wonder if there’s a deleted scene of one last interaction between Yancy and Evan Shook. I missed him in the finale.

• It’s obvious, but still a nice touch that the last Tom Petty song we hear is from the man himself, “Learning to Fly” in the last scene. The Tom Petty soundtrack adds such a distinctive touch to the show, and is thematically on point several times. It adds a few points back to Bad Monkey’s overall grade. Bill Lawrence, if you’re reading this, I would encourage you to go with Warren Zevon songs for Season 2. Zevon’s not a Florida guy, but he is a Hiaasen guy—they collaborated on the theme song to Hiaasen’s 2002 novel Basket Case—and has a deep catalog of thematically versatile songs that artists would be banging the door down to cover. 

• Deadline has a pretty thorough interview with Bill Lawrence where he talks about his plans for Season 2 (it will definitely be based on Razor Girl, and Natalie Martinez will be back in some capacity) and gives some interesting details about creative choices in Season 1 (Driggs attacks Egg in the book, but that didn’t happen in the show because Egg’s character got rewritten on the fly and it no longer made sense for him to get mangled by a primate). I recommend reading it if you want post-mortem coverage.

• It’s been an honor and a privilege watching Bad Monkey with you this season. Thank you to Myles for the opportunity, and thank you to everyone who commented for your incisive observations. The conversation in the comments made watching the show even more fun than it would have been otherwise. This was my first time writing for Episodic Medium, and I’d love to get to do it again, because this community is awesome. In the meantime, I hope you’ll follow me over on my Substack, Dad Shows.