‘Bad Monkey’ Writer Explains That ‘Tightrope Walk’ Tone and Season 2 Plans
[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for Season 1 of “Bad Monkey,” including its ending.]
The finale of Apple TV+’s “Bad Monkey” kicked off with a shock: The Dragon Queen is dead. The opening moments showed the rest of last week’s confrontation between Gracie (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Eve (Meredith Hagner), with Eve shoving her, and a tree branch piercing through her chest, killing her.
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“The Dragon Queen was a much different character in the book,” show writer and executive producer Matt Tarses explained to IndieWire. “She was an old woman and she was sort of pretty much evil;, didn’t have any redemptive qualities. And so early on, we wanted to make that character more nuanced. We made her younger, we gave her this kind of consciousness of a grandmother, in Ya-Ya. I love that character, and I love what Jodie Turner-Smith did with that stuff.”
He continued, “[Her] arc became a big, important story for us, and her coming to terms with her power and the power of nature, all that stuff is such an important theme in Hiaasen’s work. We love Jodie so much that when it finally got time to actually kill her, it ended up being a hard decision, because she’s such a great character; [do we want to] have her continue in the show, if the show continues? So that was tricky. But we felt like we had to honor it: [The character] made this mistake. She forsook her beliefs. And it felt narratively, it was appropriate that she die and then that she has this redemptive moment after her death where she’s able to make peace with the people who she hurt.”
Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Carl Hiaasen, “Bad Monkey” stars Vince Vaughn as down-on-his-luck Floridian detective Andrew Yancy, who stumbles onto a possible murder case in the Bahamas. The rest of the show is populated with every flavor of weirdo and outsider, and the wry tone (it’s Vaughn, duh) keeps things humming along among all the bloody twists and turns.
The Dragon Queen wasn’t the only death that played out in the finale: The hour also found Eve pushing her husband Nick (Rob Delaney) into the ocean to drown, as well as Eve herself escaping the Bahamas and certain arrest but then choking on a carrot and ultimately falling to her death. Sad!
“That was the big issue: How do we keep up this comedic tone, but also honor the story that we’ve been telling?” Tarses said. “I think what we did do with [Eve] is slightly comedic death. … We were sort of winking a little bit; it didn’t feel like we had to be too kind to her. When we killed her, it could be gory, and we can see the blood and the dog can, you know, lick up her blood. That all felt like something that would be fun from the beginning. But, yeah, I think those are the tonal moments [that] were a little bit of a tightrope walk.”
It can be tricky these days to note exactly how many people are watching any given streaming show, but anecdotally it sure seems like “Bad Monkey” is a hit. “It kind of exceeded our expectations,” Tarses said. “It seems like people are really loving it. I’ve never gotten more calls from people that I don’t even remember, you know, people from college and stuff. It’s been a great response. I’m hopeful that we get to do more of them.”
Equally promising? While book author Hiaasen doesn’t often do sequels, there is a sequel to his “Bad Monkey” book: “Yancy is the main character in the next book called ‘Razor Girl,’ which, if we get to do another one, I think we’ll use at least part of [the book] or maybe the whole thing,” Tarses said. “Definitely it was always the idea to try to do at least two, maybe three seasons of the show. We love it.”
And for those viewers who were hopeful Yancy and love interest Rosa (Natalie Martinez) may have another go-round following their finale goodbye, never fear: Rosa appears in that book as well…
“Bad Monkey” Season 1 is now streaming on Apple TV+.
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