MMost Apple TV+ shows are cut from the same cloth. They tend to have huge budgets, top-notch actors and competent storytelling, but with a few exceptions (Severance, Slow Horses, Sunny, basically anything with an S) they’re also relatively forgettable. Good, even entertaining, but also somehow bland and fleeting. As with the electronic products that have made the company’s fortune, there are only smooth lines and clean edges, which is fine for laptops and phones. But when it comes to TV, Apple’s output has often played it safe.

So it is again with Bad Monkey, in which Vince Vaughn plays Andrew Yancy, a disgraced detective unofficially working a case in the Florida Keys. Yancy is unable to work after attacking his lover’s shady husband by ramming his golf cart into the water. Despite being suspended from the job he clearly loves, hunky Yancy is happy at home, enjoying simple pleasures like playfully trying to prevent the sale of the mega-mansion next to his modest home or enjoying a nice drink on his sun lounger while staring at the waves.

But his quiet life is interrupted when a severed arm lands on his doorstep. A honeymooner had pulled it from the Keys after chartering a fishing boat and catching more than the marlin he was betting on. Yancy’s former partner on the police force, Rogelio (John Ortiz), arrives with this unwanted gift. No one will take the arm or the records. Neither the police nor the morgue want him. Yancy’s job is ostensibly to get the arm to safety, but Rogelio knows this is also a form of bait to lure him back into the detective profession. After a pointless search in which Yancy tries to sell the arm to a temperamental Miami coroner who claims she’s not into him (wink wink, I’m sure that’s not going to change at all), he sticks it in his freezer.

You know what they say about recently suspended cops: If you put a severed arm in their face, they’re like a dog with a collarbone. “All Yancy had to do to get his job back was stay out of trouble,” the narrator says. Naturally, Yancy is drawn to the mystery like a moth to a limb-shaped light. Was it a shark attack? Or something more sinister? Why does the alleged gun owner’s widow, Eve (Meredith Hagner of Search Party), seem strangely unimpressed by her husband’s recent defection? What does the victim’s daughter’s cult-like church have to do with all this? Isn’t Rob Delaney’s mustache impressive?

Meanwhile, in the Bahamas, Neville (Ronald Peet) and his pet monkey Driggs – the evil monkey of the title – are similarly laid-back types, and their comfortable lives are shattered by the arrival of American property developers who want to raze Neville’s cottage and build a five-star resort in its place. The narrator apologizes for the confusion caused by switching between two storylines, and it’s not until the end of the first episode that he informs us that the two stories are actually connected, as if this were a major twist. I don’t think this is a spoiler, as Eve has already appeared in Yancy and Neville’s worlds, which are quite obviously connected. You don’t have to be a detective with Yancy’s acumen to figure this out.

Bad Monkey was created by Scrubs and Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence, who is also behind Shrinking, another series that proves the theory that all of Apple’s best series must start with an S. It’s a decent, solid, mostly lovable, lurid comedy-mystery where the underdog can fight back. Whether it’s Neville protecting his home or Yancy fighting for the right to have his detective work done right, even if he has to cut a few legal corners to do it, this is the little guy going up against the big guy, figuratively and literally. By the end of the second episode, the series gets a little more character. There’s a dragon queen in the Bahamas who’s summoned to curse the real estate developer who’s making Neville’s life miserable. There are femme fatales and drive-by shootings, and all the while Vaughn ambles around on his bike calling out characters with names like Pussy Magnet. It’s fun, it’s relaxed, and it makes you want to go on vacation. But with Vince Vaughn and all the influence of Apple, you might expect something even more magical.