One of the most talked-about shows on Apple TV Plus this year has been Sugar, the Colin Farrell detective neo-noir about a detective in Hollywood trying to find a missing woman who may have been involved in something dangerous.
Fans fell in love with Sugar for its tight plot, short episode lengths and all the references it made to classic noirs, even when the Sugar plot twist divided watchers, and people have been hoping for news of a Sugar season 2 renewal. If that's you, you'll be glad to know that Apple TV Plus has something for you while you wait.
This 'something' is another new show that'll scratch your itch, which has just debuted. This show is called Bad Monkey, and it's another crime drama which has a lot in common with Sugar.
Bad Monkey stars comedy actor Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy, a man who's been suspended from the police force in the Florida Keys due to some bad decisions. When a dismembered arm is found out at sea, everyone wants to disregard the death as an accident, however Yancy isn't convinced.
Yancy begins to investigate, despite being reassigned to become a restaurant inspector, and so he has to balance his personal and professional relationships with this crime that he's becoming too involved in.
Bad Monkey is based on a 2013 book by Carl Hiaasen, who also wrote books that turned into the movies Striptease and Hoot amongst others.
The surface-level connections between Sugar and Bad Monkey are clear: they're both crime thrillers. But there's a lot more that makes them feel pretty similar.
Take, for example, the presentation: in both shows, each episode seems to last about a day, with them beginning with the character waking up and ending when they go to sleep (there are exceptions, of course). They also both feature narration, with Sugar narrating his own adventures and one of Yancy's friends narrating his.
On a deeper level, both stories are very closely linked with their location, more so than most crime thrillers I've watched recently: Sugar is about Los Angeles and Bad Monkey is about the Florida Keys. You get a sense of the people, crimes and communities of the location and how it ties into the case.
And PI John Sugar and Andrew Yancy both seem to be more morally righteous heroes than most morally-gray detectives you see nowadays. Sugar helps homeless people get themselves back on their feet while Yancy nags his partner to drive better and cares about restaurant and architectural rule violations. It makes them more interesting protagonists than the endless and boring similar-feeling characters that live in some morally gray zone that all seem to feel identical.
I've only seen a few episodes of Bad Monkey at the time of writing (two episodes debuted on Wednesday, August 14 and new ones come weekly until mid-October) so I can't say yet whether we'll see a mid-season twist as dramatic as Sugar's. But if the crime and investigation side of that west-coast show is what drew you to it, then this east-coast alternative will give you more of what you love.
